h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Right. First things first ...

You have proven yourself beyond certifiable in any number of places. Your dreams are atleast 30'ish years out of date, and ...

The fact that we seem to share mutual friends is a bit un-nerving.

Anyway, as we do keep crossing paths in friends' journals, would you be offended if I tagged your name to my list? Just to track some of your posts, journals, et al (who-ever 'Al' is ) and either determine that I am totally misreading you, or that I am more in need of help than I thought.

You are, of course, welcome to browse my PS, 'all' one of my current journals, even the link from the PS to my demented world as some pics have caught it.

Just PLEASE don't tell anyone I came here. My reputation as one without humour or what-ever might be tainted.

Oh, and before I forget, ... Yes, time travel DOES have traffic jams. I seem to be stuck in about 1979 ...

I'm stuck in 1979 too. That's one coincidence too many .

Go ahead, add my name to your list.
I'll add yours to mine.
My dreams are proof that I'm demented. There are even a few in which Sigmund Freud is treating me, shaking his head in disbelief as he goes.....

The scarey thing is that I remember almost none of 1979 though!!! A single lad, first military posting ... and in Newfoundland. There was only one state of being, . I do vaguely recall the arrival of 1981 though, and have been told of a horrid thing called the -era having come and gone.

1979 was the year I bought a secondhand (thirdhand, actually) mobile home, which I'm still living in. And it was the year *before* my blood pressure started going to Hell, and my department was gutted by the town I work for . The last year of innocence before the cruel realities started coming in.

Then I'm going to have to guess that you have a year or three on me ... I didn't dive into real-world stuff (marriage) until '81. From the time I left the parental home in '77, it was variations of a party. With military recruit and trade training fitted in there somewhere.

U fubushed college in 1970, graduate school in 1973, and was ensconced in a fulltime longterm job two weeks after finishing grad school. I basically haven't had a long period of not working (except for illness) since 1971.

This probably helps to explain my strange dreams, as my brain seems to want to defect to somebody with a more relaxed lifestyle.

"U fubished" should have been "I finished."
My fingers are part of the conspiracy too, apparently.

I once thought of fubushing a college or two, but figured it might mar a relatively clean criminal record.

Doing a bit of reverse-math then, I'd guess that you're about a decade my senior. Not quite as old as dirt, but closer than I.

So just curious, what IS your field of employment expertise? In brief, mine is the service and repair of nearly anything related to military radio, navigational aids or computer-based systems.

I work the reference desk in a public library, where I help neophytes figure out how to use a mouse, scroll up or down, and
curse at Godzilla Firefox.

I personally prefer Netscape/Mozzila. But then, maybe that's because I became familiar with it first. And it IS all inclusive, for browsing, e-mail, FTP, pretty much any net function. Whereas IE depends on Outlook and other 'client' software. I'm a bit of an anti-M$ snob.


*psssst ... please don't mention that last bit to Batty. She might of the belief that I actually like the stuff. *

I could live with Internet Explorer. I could live with Mozzila Firefox. But when I fill in at the Branch library, I have to work at the computer of a co-worker who has *both* on her computer, and it just about makes me pull my hair out by the roots. I use a lot of keyboard commands to access the columns along the top of the screen, and the consequences are different for the two different browsers. If I mistakenly segue into the wrong browser, I lose valuable time from using the wrong commands.

Why would anyone learn Mozzila before Internet Explorer? We used to use Netscape when we first joined the network, but that was phased out in favor of Internet Explorer, and now we seem poised to migrate to Mozzila.

What's next? Linux?

Netscape (and it's core engine, Mozilla) were very prolific browsers before IE arrived on the market. It was the first one (aside from utilities under OS/2) that I used. When I was still investigating WinNT 3.51 That WAS quite some time ago, ... about 12 years, I think.

Once a year, I would like to take a one-week vacation from all things computer. Julius Caesar and Mozart and P.D.Q. Bach all managed fine without computers.

Indeed they did. But I met my first computer thingie around 1970, and have been hooked ever since. I've been a techy-geek for decades, long before the military taught me the trades of it, or home-grade systems could be found.

The first computer program was written by the daughter of Sir Humphrey for his steam-powered computer in the early 1800s.

In the 1950s and 1960s. computers were enormous thngs that operated with punch cards, and if you got the order of the cards wrong, the whole thing would be wrong.

Installed in our regional high school, the HP2100A had 8K of core memory, a huge copper platter for long-term storage, could be fed by 5-level baudot paper-tape, or stacked Holarith cards. We programmed in 2nd-generation BASIC or FORTRAN IV, using pencil-encoded Holarith cards. My two elder brothers were in that school at the time, I was still too young. But the three of us created a training language called HYPO, ... a hypothetical comuter language. First level students learned this simple language of two-digit commands, and 3-digit operands, along with flow-charting. Once they had a good grasp of that, they moved on to BASIC ...

And that was in 1970, and the 'computer' outsized even the larger Coke machines of today, sucking enough electricity for any 4 homes.

I remember Allen Sherman's song "Automation," based on the tune of "Fascination."

It was automation, I know,
That was what was making the factory go.
It was IBM. It was Univac.
It was all those gears going "clickety-clack," dear.
I thought automation was keen,
Till you were replaced by a ten-ton machine.
It was that compuer that tore us apart, dear.
Automation broke my heart.

There's an IBM 503
Sitting next to me, dear, where you used to be.
Doesn't have your smile,
Doesn't have your shape.
Just a lot of lightbulbs and punchcards and tape, dear....

That does go back a-ways ...

One of the steps of my basic electronics training including 'solid state'. Transistors and diodes. (Tubes were still the mainstays) We built devices that could add in binary, up to 8 digits. The sheer bench-top space required for that really enhanced my appreciation for the technologies.

And now, kids pay $2 for an ethereal pocket friend that they feed and care for. All far more complex than that HP2100A ... Gawds, but I'm feeling old now.

My parents are 87. To me, that's what old is. l-)