The first computer I ever saw was at my mother’s office. I was in pre-school. It had a green phosphor display, and a big mechanical keyboard. Someone in my mom’s office showed me how it worked. I pressed a key and the letter showed up on the screen. We made a drawing out of text, crude ASCII art, and printed it out on one of those extra-wide sheets of form-feed printer paper with the green and white stripes. I think we wrote out “Merry Christmas,” but don’t hold me to that.
In elementary school, I used Apple IIs in various configurations. I even got to use a TRS–80 at one point. From second to fifth grade, I got to go to the Mentally Gifted program at another school, where they had Apple IIs, and I got interested in typing out LOGO programs from a huge book. I still know how to draw a star in LOGO. It’s embedded in my brain. However, those computers were mostly used for playing Where in the World is Carmine Sandiego? It was enough to get me hooked. Soon, I started bugging my parents for my own machine.
On Christmas in 1992, I got my first, real, personal computer. It was a VTech PCPartner 486DX/33 Mhz. It came with a 3.5†High Density floppy drive, a 5.25†High Density floppy drive, a 470 MB hard disk drive, 4 MB of RAM, MS-DOS 5.0, and Windows 3.1. This machine saw me through a lot. Over the years, my dad and I upgraded it, first with a 2X CD-ROM Drive, and SoundBlaster 16, later with a 1.26 GB hard drive and a whopping 16 MB of RAM. It played Doom and SimCity 2000 like a champ. We put in a 56K modem, and after upgrading to Windows 95, it was the machine that got me on the Internet for the first time. I built my first website on it, a MST3k fan site, hosted on Geocities.
Not long after I got online, the old girl began to show its age. The machine began to randomly restart. Taking it to the local computer repair shop, we found out the memory slots had cracked open, and the RAM was becoming unseated. They put in a couple shims to keep the RAM from popping out, but the writing was on the wall. Time to put this old thing out to pasture. That Christmas, I got my second computer: a Gateway 2000 Pentium II 266 Mhz, with 64MB of RAM, and a 6.4 GB hard drive. It was an oddly shaped machine, with bulging sides, to avoid the boring “beige box†look. Of course, the day I got it, I ended up snapping part of the CD-ROM drive tray. It still worked, and ended up being my parents machine for years, until I took it back to turn into a Linux file server. [1]
That machine’s replacement was a computer I won in a contest during High School. A no-name/off-brand Celeron 466 Mhz machine. I remember upgrading it to 256MB of RAM, and smoothly playing Quake III on it. Shortly after the upgrade, I named it Pandora, after Nick’s computer in the webcomic _General Protection Fault. The Pandora naming convention lasted through to its successor, a custom-built white box PC, Pandora Mk. II, which was based around a Pentium III 866Mhz. This is the computer I took to college, and back. I built the original version of Sanspoint on it, too.
Pandora Mk. II was the first Pandora to actually live up to its name. When I first got it, it would overheat, necessitating a trip back to the guy who built it to repair it. During this time I used my Dad’s old work ThinkPad, which had been crudely upgraded with a Pentium II. It was enough to get me online, but the battery life was non-existent. After it was fixed, Pandora Mk. II lasted a while, but later developed an odd symptom where the DVD drive would start automatically ejecting the tray… even while using it. Replacing the drive fixed that. I also had a video card die on me, as well as a monitor using that machine. I was not sorry to see it go.
In college I got my first laptop: an IBM ThinkPad T30, paid for by my tuition. I named it Kayo, after the keyboard player for the Japanese rock band POLYSICS. For a time, however, I had three computers in my dorm room: Pandora Mk. II, Kayo, and BastardSon, the old Gateway 2000 machine, now running Slackware and holding my MP3 collection. At one point, I actually blew a circuit breaker for my dorm room running all three machines, and an Ethernet hub.
During college, I made the transition from being a Windows user to a full-time Linux user, installing Red Hat, then later Fedora Core on my desktop and laptop. Using Linux gave me a bit of hacker cred at Polytechnic University, but my abysmal Computer Science—and other grades—lost the cred again. I stuck with Linux for a good four years, eventually getting frustrated with it, particularly after I got a digital camera and an iPod, which set me up for the next phase of my computing life.
But that’s for another post.
Installing a massive 250GB drive in the old Gateway machine led to the greatest MacGuyver feat I’ve ever pulled. Unplugging the original hard drive, I wrenched a pin off its logic board. I managed to get the drive recognized by placing a piece of Scotch tape over the lead, and where it connected on the board. I’d have bet anything that wouldn’t work. ↩
My podcast, Crush On Radio has just relaunched! We’re calling it Season 2. We’re doing shorter, more focused shows now, and with the new season comes a new look—which is very important for an audio-only podcast.
Come to a comfortable seated position. Allow your sitbones to sink deep into your Herman Miller chair. Let the regional marketing world outside you melt away. Release any tension you might be holding onto — be it a meaningless job, a directionless relationship, or just the constant pressure to feign interest in other people’s affairs. This is YOUR practice. A time to check in with yourself after not having done so in over 11 minutes.
The other night, I found myself at a co-working space around 20th and Broadway, with about thirty to forty people, all working for or running startup companies. As the employee of a startup, this is a perfectly logical and reasonable place for me to be. Besides, they had Yuengling Lager, which is a rare treat at events up here.
So, with my freshly delivered business cards in their holder, my boss and I took in the crowd, the DJ spinning a mix of contemporary and 80s dance music, and the nice shared working space the company sponsoring the event rented out to people. Oh, and we tried to chat up other startup people, swap business cards, and maybe plan future things over the sound of way too loud subwoofers.
This is not my strong suit. Which is a bit of a problem, seeing as I’m involved with the community side of our social network. Dealing with people from behind a computer keyboard is far easier for me than dealing with people face to face. On the Internet, if someone’s bothering you, you can either not reply, or block them. In real life, there’s more social signals to balance.
Still, we’re all there for the same reason, right? [1] We’ve all got companies that we want to promote, grow, get investors and/or users for. The first step is to step out and make the introduction. It won’t come to you.
Looking back on my own performance, I recognized three problems.
1. I hate interrupting conversations.
Looking and walking around the room, I found a lot of people already chatting each other up. Looking for an opening, I found none, at least for a while. This, maybe, could have been avoided by showing up earlier, or just having more patience. Or being willing to jump in.
2. Loud room, loud music.
I left the venue with my ears ringing and my voice hoarse. It was a lot like how I feel when I leave a concert at a small club. [2] This didn’t affect other people too much, but with my pre-existing difficulties in communication, having thumping bass and not being able to hear people made matters worse.
3. I didn’t have a pitch ready.
Mea culpa. I know my product. I know what we need, and what we do for people. The last networking event I went to was one where companies were showing off products, not just meeting and chatting. This gave me something to do, a pre-existing topic to talk about. I found that to be a much more pleasent and productive night than this one. [3] Here, the onus was on me to find something to discuss.
The event wasn’t a washout. I managed to talk to someone who works for the company running the event, and got a lead on new office space for my company. I met someone who had a neat iPhone game. I also found someone who is involved with music promotion and concerts in NYC, which is always a good thing to know. Still, these didn’t happen until I had wandered around the room a few times and downed a couple lagers. It was great networking, but not enough, and a little late, but now I’m a little more prepared for next time.
Well, some people were there for the open bar, but the point still stands. ↩
Proof that I’m getting old: I wear earplugs to shows now. ↩
That particular event was hosted by Bloomberg, and it also had a lot of amazing food, which didn’t hurt my opinion of it. ↩
A company has a record setting quarter, makes more profit and money than they have made, per quarter, in history, and the stock tanks.
All because the company’s numbers didn’t meet the numbers someone analyst pulled out of their ass.
Thankfully, Apple’s stock price only matters to the shareholders. And probably not all of them.
For the rest of us, as long as Apple makes quality products that we want to buy, their stock price could be pennies.
Who is Apple beholden to? If you ask anyone on Wall Street, they’ll say “their shareholders.” If you ask Apple you’ll get a different answer.
What really blows my mind here, is that a successful and lucrative company is being penalized because their idea of success is different than the idea of success concocted by some guy in a suit on the other side of the country, paid to determine what qualifies as success so that other people can decide where to put their money.
This could easily read as fanboy-ism, and maybe it is. On the other hand, I can’t help but be upset when I see well-deserved, hard-earned success penalized, because its it’s “not enough” success.
By the way, the analysts’s target revenue for Apple? $54.58 billion.
Apple’s actual revenue? $54.5 billion.
The difference is less than one percent. But that’s enough for investors to run, screaming.
Clearly, I don’t understand how the stock market works.