p e n g u i n d e v i l

I’ve been thinking about computers lately, once again pondering occupational prospects, I was thinking about all the years I’ve spent with these things and it got me pondering the boxes I’ve had. Not the miscellaneous ones I’ve had around that didn’t work, but the ones that I actually used…

1) I was lucky enough to own a Sinclair ZX81 back in 81 or 82. Though it had 1k of memory (not really enough to fill the TV screen with data) and used a cassette recorder for storage, I was rather excited by it, though its only ability seemed to be programming in Basic. It was fine for me, though certainly lacked the power of the DEC Teletype I used at school and the fancy Apple II than my buddy Todd had (at home! In his room! spoiled…)..

Sinclair ZX81

The DECWriter II, my first love… With no annoying screen to hurt my eyes.

2) after that began my sad years of longing during which I had nothing. But then, I got a job and in 1988 I plunked down $1700 for an IBM PS/2 Model 25… And then I coughed up another $500 for a 20mb internal harddrive that never quite fit (it bowed the case below the screen). Why did I pick it? A color screen and two 3.5″ disc drives! I spent many hours playing Bard’s Tale and writing lame Sci-fi stories with that thing! My friends used Mac’s, but I loathed those silly things (for the old reason of “they enable people to use computers without knowing anything about them”). Also, those old IBM “clicky” keyboards as still the best ones ever made…

PS/2 model 25

3) In 1991 I bought a Gateway. I seem to recall that it was a 386sx. Though it cost the same as the IBM, it was a big step up, being much faster and more powerful, having a separate monitor, a built in harddrive, and both 3.5″ and 4.25″ disc drives! I liked it fine and played many, many, many hours of Civilization on it. I ended up installing Windows 3.1 and that was a turning point for me. Windows 3.1 was atrocious! After I messed with it a bit, I was at a party where I witnessed a Mac II in action… My god, I had to give the Mac side a whirl.

4) and so in 1993(?) I bought a cheap new LC II ($999!). It seemed quite a revolution to me. It was a slower, older computer than my Gateway, with less RAM. But it ran so much better, looked so much better, worked so much better and it was a whole new experience. At that point, I fled the Wintel land. I liked the Mac so much that I realized that I needed a better one.

5) In 1994 I bought was is still the most expensive computer I had ever bought (at $2050), a Powermac 7100. I loved that box and began to spend about my every waking hour at the computer, especially once I signed up for a short-lived stint with America Online. Their proprietary, non-internet, content bored me so I moved to Teleport (a local ISP, still the account that I use) and Netscape Navigator. Also, at this time, I lived with my brother-in-law (who had bought my IBM a number of years earlier) and he then bought a 6100 and we became a mac-obsessed household!

Powermac 7100

6) The 7100 did me good for a while, but I had really wanted: a tower, more speed, and a cd-rom, so in 1997 I bought a clone, a Powercomputing Powercenter Pro. This was, in it’s time, probably the best computer I’ve ever had. Great design, powerful, it had everything… Including great marketing! I also quit my job in 1997 and followed a computer hobby path for nine months: I bought one of the fabled Spartacus 20th Anniversary Mac’s, a Powerbook 520c, a Newton and an original iMac. I also started a web design company, got an A+ Technician certification, went to two PMUG MacCamps and two Macworld conferences, one on each coast.

Powercenter Pro

20th Anniversary Macintosh

7) After I got things back in order again, I sadly sold my Powercenter (well, and my Spartacus) and in 1999 bought a G4 “Yikes” (during the two or so months that they were available). This was a great computer, fast, good looking, incredible design! I also started working at Teleport Internet during this time, got DSL and set up my first home Network. But I liked the computer so much, that I used it for years… In fact, for four years!

G4 Yikes

8) In 2003, though my “Yikes” still performed at the level I needed (as games were the main reason for upgrading, but the level of advanced games that came out for the mac was so low that a new computer was rarely needed). But I still felt the need to upgrade, I had the money and liked the thought of a dvd player in the computer, so I bought a Mirrored-Door G4, the same computer that I use now. For years I have been drooling over the “Cheese Grater” G5’s (I guess they’re Intel now) but I just can’t do it, as I don’t have the money, and this old boat still floats just fine.

Mirrored Door G4

9) We also bought an iBook in 2006. I liked it just fine, but we sold it as we didn’t really ever use it.

Okay, consider yourself tagged, if you want to be.

I know that I already said that I’d just be putting anything book related at Goodreads, I picked up this meme from You’ve Gotta be Kiddin Me, (another of the 31 for 21 bloggers) and I thought it would be fun. So here goes.

Total number of books?
I haven’t the slightest idea. Well, let me think. Back before we moved into storage we had all of our books in one room and I would guess it was something like 50-60 linear feet? We tried to get rid of some, but it only ended being a couple of boxes. I would say that they are pretty equally divided between his and hers.

Last Book read?
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy.

Last Book Bought?
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

Five meaningful Books?

1. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander. No, not just a screed against wasting time at the TV. Mander delves into the effects of the medium itself. He finds that the act of watching television and receiving information in that manner, has real harmful effects on psychology and society. Negatively affecting peoples comprehension abilities and distorting the connection between reality and fiction, and the difference between active and passive experience.

2. The Seventeen Traditions by Ralph Nader. Regardless of your thoughts about old Ralphie, this is a compelling book on raising children to have character, morals and independent thought.

3. Some Mistakes of Moses by Robert Ingersoll. A compelling, logical, thorough and entertaining response to the Old Testament written by one of the great Free-Thinkers of the 19th Century.

4. Oedipus at Stalingrad by Gregor von Rezzori. Well, probably my favorite novel.

5. The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson. Again, regardless of your feelings about Fluoridation, this is a scary and well documented look at the methods that the government will use to achieve their means: Blacklisting, lying, coercion… It’s creepy and gives you the feeling that the government will say anything to accomplish their nefarious goals.

I’m still a bit harried being freshly back in town, no time for a real post, but I wanted to post something, and since I’ve had a hard time finding photos of St Johnsbury online…

I made a flickr page of some pictures that we took of my favorite part of that town…

Click here to see them.

One of the big questions this fall is all around our television/monitor setup. Currently we have a nice 26″ (or is it 27″) crt television and a 21″ crt monitor. There is a move afoot to switch to a single screen, and an lcd one to boot. Part of the issue with this has been that I have no experience with such a beast, except for looking at the Alien DVD menu at Kurty’s… Until now.

The folks here have a 27″ Akia TV and so I spent a little time checking it out. First thing, they had it set to “fill” or “full” or something, so the picture (Charter cable via Tivo) looks bad, like a stretched out old VHS picture. Even when you switch it to 4:3 the picture still looks bad. There is one HD broadcast channel that they can pick up, NBC, and this morning the Today Show on it looked grand, a big full widescreen picture, rich and the right ratio to fill the screen with no stretching or anything. Now this doesn’t make much difference to me, as I can’t generally stand tv, cable or otherwise. But occasionally I like to watch PBS and if the HD PBS that we get at home looks like this, that seems quite nice. I’m also not too concerned with using it for a computer, as the screen is big enough to replace my screen (which honestly, could easily be smaller with no bother to me)

The issue is, of course, movies. I want to watch them in the correct ratio, and have them be larger than my current viewing set-up. I tried checking out the different DVD realities here, but I don’t feel confident that I really learned the deal. Nearly all of their DVD’s are fullscreen (I always wondered who bought those) and though I don’t have very many of those, there seem to be two viewing options: 4:3, in which case they are much smaller then they would be on our current TV, or stretched out, which doesn’t look good. Widescreen DVD’s (non-anthropomorphic) basically end up being very small, as they appear, bars and all, in a little 4:3 box in the center of the screen. It seems that in these cases, we would be dropping a lot of picture size with this switch.

The anthropomorphic widescreen DVD’s, on the other hand, seem like they might work out. Though using a 16:9 TV, the differences of the various widescreen formats becomes very apparent. Basically, the issue is that if all of the DVD’s were anthropomorphic widescreens at a 16:9 ratio, it seems like a TV like this would be a great improvement, but I fear that with a lot of things (maybe everything but HD tv and anthropomorphic DVD’s), we would be losing a lot of viewing area.

Anyway, I didn’t have much time to really dig around, so these feelings are all from a cursory examination. It seems to me that a 27″ (which would be the most convenient to buy) won’t cut it and that we may need to think about a 32″ LCD. I am curious about the experiences of anyone (who is a dvd watcher, concerned with picture quality and image size) who has switched from a CRT to an LCD.

When thinking about buying a house, one cannot help but think about how much one can afford. I think that one one major factor that makes homes so unaffordable is the mortgage loan. I can’t help but think of my grandmother. She bought and sold many, many houses from the 1940’s through the early 1980’s and every one of these deal was a personal contract, she never utilized a mortgage loan. While mortgage loans are generally considered filled with fee’s for the buyer, in exchange for loaning them the money. I think there is another aspect to them: depriving the seller of most of the money that someone pays for their home. What mortgage loans do is take up to 60% of the actual selling price away from the seller and give it to the bank as a fee to give the seller the rest of the money up front. If you list a house for 150,000 and you sell it to someone using a 30 year 7% mortgage, the buyer will actually pay more like 350,000. Yet the seller gets less than half of that.

The mortgage is a lure to the seller to give them some money upfront in exchange for keeping the lions share of the purchase money for themselves. Under a contract, when a house sells for 150,000, the buyer gets what the seller pays. Under a mortgage, the seller still gets 150,000 for their property, but the buyer pays 350,000 and the bank gets 200,000. Who really wins in that situation?

It seems to me that under a personal contract, it would work better for the seller to pick a higher selling price (of 300,000, 250,000, etc…) and then they would get much more money and the seller would spend much less money and the bank wouldn’t profit at all. Yes, it would take the buyer maybe 20 years to get all of their money, but then, if they were planning on using the money for buying another house, they could just turn the payments that they are receiving around to be the payment for their next house.

In the long run, it seems like mortgage loans were created as a way for banks to make vast profits off of something that they weren’t getting anything out of. And it also serves as a way to raise house values, at the primary benefit of the bank. I realize that there has been some bad news lately for these banks, but it seems that their greed got so extreme that they began financing people to buy houses that they knew darn well that they couldn’t afford. Though what the banks end up getting out of that situation is that they collect on the house for a while, write off the failed loan and then end up owning the house anyway, at which point they can sell it again. Maybe they are intentionally financing people who can’t afford these loans?

As we were originally scheduled to relocate to Vermont this past July, one of the great thrills (aside from, oh, friends, family, roots, landscape and all that sort of stuff) for me in staying in good old Portland, Oregon for a bit longer was that I would be in town for yet another HP Lovecraft Film Festival…

Lovecraft 2007

Through some strange mind blanking of mind, when we made plans to come and visit Vermont this month, the festival somehow left my mind as I booked the tickets. So now I am a week beyond it, and still in Vermont! While I have really enjoyed my time here, in my fatalistic style I am assuming that it was my last chance to go to the festival. Yes, it can be a bit silly but I really love the idea and the concept and the fact that people make these movies, especially the shorts, and the chance to look at so many great HPL related t-shirts. Plus, this year, in addition to the great shorts, they were screening In the Mouth of Madness and The Thing!

Well, maybe once we’re out here we’ll make up for it by annually making the 500 mile trip to Toronto for Rue Morgue’s Festival of Fear, I’ve always wanted to go to that!

I have certainly spent my share of time around “true grue”: newscasts, forensics/crime shows, working in the true crime book section… But I must say that I doubt the advantages of this kind of media. Experiencing things such as: photos of murder victims in books, extensively detailing violent crimes on tv and in books, clearly explaining peoples methods for “breaking, entering, raping and killing”, playing 911 tapes on the air (!), showing gruesome crime scenes… Now not only does it appear in the news and in books everyday, but there are whole tv channels that show it all day long.

I wonder how much of an ulterior motive there is behind this. I don’t just feel like they are being aired/printed just for ratings/sales (though, obviously, that is a big part of it), I can’t help but wonder how much of it is intended to instill more feelings of irrational fear in the general population. Does knowing/seeing this information make people any safer? Or does it actually increase the dangers? I would imagine that while it may not actually inspire much crime, it is certainly bound to inspire more crime than it will prevent. And since I think that a lot of our society (military proliferation, expansion of law enforcement powers, degradation of civil rights, the right to bear arms, homeland security, xenophobia, fear of other religions, consumer desire…) is based on insuring insecurity and fear where there is little or no basis for it, I have to again question the intentions.

I also have to wonder about who is really interested in it and why. Spending three years working in the true crime section, there is a particular portion of the population who are overwhelming the biggest fans of these books. While I’m not going to point out any root cause or reasons for this, it becomes so unquestionably the case that one cannot help but wonder why most of the interest in this subject matter seems to come from white, middle-class, housewives from their mid-20’s through their 50’s. It begins to seem a bit odd. What is the attraction there to seeing other peoples misery?

I used to work with a women who would always have pictures of gruesome accident victims as the desktop on her computer. I asked her once about and she said that it was to remind herself that their were people worse off then herself…

While in Maine I saw this creepy TV ad. It seemed to be about teens waiting before sex. Now while this is a fine notion, waiting until they are mature/informed enough to make good decisions regarding: choice of parters, birth control, std’s, etc… This ad ended up following none of those angles. Its angle was only that they should “wait until marriage”.

Well, now that is a bit different. While that theory does follow the “good old American dream” stereotype, in this day and age, when some people have no interest in marriage or children and some people have children and life long committed relationships without marriage and some folks cannot legally get married? It seems a bit dated.

But not just dated… Please let me know if this is incorrect but the only actual reason that I am aware of for people to wait until “marriage” for sex is one of religious belief. A notion of sin? Now while that alone doesn’t make this ad bad, as religious entities are well and free to make advertisements expressing their views… This ad was paid for by the US Government!

To have the government espouse religious views is not only offensive to those of us who follow no religious creeds, but it seems to cross the line of what is generally considered to be the appropriate separation of church and state. As in, it seems to be the federal government suggesting that people should follow the beliefs held by some particular religions. And while we know that the current Government believes this way (mandating religion) as one of their “many signs of illegitimacy”, broadcasting this stuff so blatantly on television ads is certainly gall of a higher degree.

So we’re back from Maine. We never actually made it to the coast, in fact the getting and coming wasn’t too great. But the day that we spent there was quite nice. And on the trip there we passed through a beautiful, foggy area that I must hike around in sometime, and I train that I must take. It was called Crawford Notch.

But anyway, Portland. I feel like we would rather have spent the last few years living there than in Big Portland. It was just a cool place. The old town seemed quite old. The sidewalks were bricks that must have dated from somewhere in the 19th centry, lots of nice old buildings and, though it only shows a population of 63,000, it felt a lot more citylike than that. In a lot of ways, it felt more citylike (at least “east coast city”) than Big Portland, which is many, many times its size.

But to counter my impressions of my last visit, the Old Town/Shopping district didn’t seem irritating like I had though it did, places have Veggie options on the menus, there are a good number of places to grab a beer and even micro-breweries! There were some good stores too. We found “Books Etc.” a “new book” store downtown that, while small, had a good selection and “Yes Books”, a used book store that, while disorganized (one of those “books stacked on the floor” kind of places), seemed a fun place to browse and they had a nice history section. It once again led me to wonder if the “Powells phenomenon” has really drained Portland of good, old books. Also, and I thought quite exciting, we stumbled on a little basement music store, “Bull Moose Music”, that I wandered around in and found not only a nice selection of new and used horror and Sci-fi DVD’s, but they actually had a “new and used” extreme metal section! While I didn’t find anything I needed, I imagine that it’s probably the only section like that in New England outside of Boston, so it’s good to know that it was there.

We discussed the notion of moving there, rather than Vermont… As it would be easier in a lot of ways, but I think we are still leaning towards the small town kind of community as where we want to settle.

We are about to set off on a vacation from our Vermont vacation. A two day trip to Maine! Portland, the coast? We are unscheduled and plan on just driving around looking for a nice play to stay somewhere in the Old Orchards/Portland/Freeport area. Hopefully not too close to Freeport, though of course we will have to go there to take in the outlets and the LL Bean store.

Really we just want to enjoy the coast and wander around Portland. Our friend Chanin lived there for years and it sending us some links of good places to go, and I really just want to check it out, as I’ve been there once before, many years ago, as wasn’t as taken with it as I had expected to be. So I feel like I might be in a bettter place to get it now. But we’ll see.

And I am curious about the coast because I’m not familier with the Atlantic but once we’re out here, it will be the local ocean, so I’d like to see what’s what. I think that Maine has a pretty rocky and stormy coast, which is my favorite kind, so I think it will be nice. Of course, the other thing is that I certainly won’t be finding time to make a post tomorrow, so I’ll be missing the goal once again, though I’ve been expecting this one.