More embarrassment

Since we won’t be able to pay a lot of personal attention to the kids in the upcoming week due to some other things going on, I felt bad and took my youngest and her friend to Hannah Montana: The Movie this afternoon.

They weren't going to our little theater in town, so we wanted a parent to be there to protect them "pervs". And, since I wanted the little tweens to be free for their tween talk, I sat a few rows back in one of the “single loser” seats. Unfortunately, as the theater began to fill up and the movie was getting ready to start, I realized I was now that “weird perv” sitting alone watching Hannah Montana at noon on a Saturday.

I suddenly went from being this guy:

…to being this guy, lurking at the playground:

<sigh>
No good dead ever goes unpunished I guess.

As for the movie, I’m not a Hannah fan, but overall it wasn’t as painful as it could have been. From the first 5 minutes I thought it would be terrible, but it wasn’t too bad. Other than the fact that I now have to move further away from the school.

You remember that feeling...

...when you were a little kid and you ran up to the person you thought was your parent in a store and they turn around and IT'S NOT THEM?
That unique and exquisite mixture of fear and embarrassment.

As it turns out, you can still feel that as an adult - especially if you drive a Honda Odyssey.
Honda Odysseys, as everyone knows come in several interesting colors - all of them silver. There's greenish silver, blueish silver, silvery silver, etc.
My wife's Odyssey is a sageish silver.

On the way home from the Seattle Tea Party, we stopped at a craft store and I had to run in to see if they had some weights for a Pinewood Derby car I was helping one of my kids with. (They didn't. They no longer stock Pinewood Derby parts. Michaels, why do you hate America so much?)

So I came out of the store and walked up to the driver's side of the silvery Odyssey. I came up to the door and - while my brain was still processing why there was someone already in the driver's seat - I tugged on the door handle. The door was locked. More brain processing. In the same instant a slightly angry, slightly frightened man looked me right in the eye.

AHHHHH...you're not my mommy!!!!
I mean, this isn't the right car.

I left the hapless driver sitting there pondering how lucky he was to have foiled the car jack attempt and backed up into the car behind me, knocking the side mirror a bit in the process.

I quickly found my way over to the RIGHT silver Odyssey - which was full of my family all laughing at me.

If I'd been in just my underwear, I'd swear it was a dream.

Reflections on Tea Parties

I’ve heard so much nonsense written about these tea parties. Let’s leave MSNBC’s homo-erotica totally out of the picture and just talk about reasonably reputable sources.

CNN says they are “anti-CNN”. Wow! Narcissist much? These are the kind of guys that Tweet, “I’m eating a really good sandwich right now” without realizing that even their friends don’t care.
This is the ranting of a network that has no idea how irrelevant they are in their own marketplace. <cough cough> ratings <cough>

Fox News says they are “anti-Tax” (same page, scroll down a little). Well, at least they aren’t saying they are “pro Fox”. They are a little anti-Tax, but not in the sense that we don’t think we should pay taxes.
In fact, I think 9 out of 10 party goers would agree that MORE people need to be paying taxes. A fundamental problem with our system now is that only about half the people pay anything at all and the top 2-3% of income earners pay the lion’s share. Everyone should be a stake holder in America. No one group should get a tax cut or tax increase. That is the epitome of fairness and avoids the built-in danger of all democracies.
Somehow Fox News has seized for itself some sort of credit in this movement. I’m not sure how that happened. We all know that this idea is straight from Rick Santelli on CNBC.

Republican party leaders seem to think this is an event supporting them. Hold on there guys. Please reference the Congressional Record from 2001-2006 and tell me why we’d be looking to you for leadership. I heard of some tea party events where Republican politicians were booed off the stage.

People everywhere are saying they are “anti-Obama”. I’ll concede there is a heavy thread of this but ONLY because he’s the current driver of this policy. Virtually all of the people at these tea parties were just as upset at the Bush-Paulson plan, which Obama has extended and continued. Virtually all of the people at these tea parties were just as upset at the Bush stimulus plan of 2008, and it was a mere shadow of the current one.
And Obama’s not alone. Pelosi and Reid are right up there on the anger list.

The key to “getting it” on these tea parties is to realize that what people are upset about are fundamental changes to the fabric of our culture and society that will have a starkly negative outcome. This isn’t a guess. You can look at many examples, the UK comes to mind. As Margaret Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

So the tea parties are not about throwing Obama out. They're not about cutting taxes per se. They are about stopping our trip down this change in our economic system. Consider:

• For the first time ever, the Federal government has replaced a CEO, effectively by order. (GM)
• For the first time ever, the Federal government has forced healthy banks to accept money they didn’t want. (Wells Fargo, and others)
• AND they won’t let them pay it back despite their desire to do so.
• Because the VA hospitals work so well, they want to take over the entire medical system.

There are two choices facing us: “trickle down prosperity” (AKA the way economies actually work, like it or not) or “trickle up poverty”.
We newly dubbed right wing extremist tea party goers prefer the former.

You can point fingers all you want, but the entire mess we are in right now has its roots in government intervention in the housing market that forced institutions to loan money to people who shouldn’t have gotten loans. In response to that level of risk, these same institutions created all kinds of securitization to protect themselves from that injection of business risk.
Further, the government institutions Fannie and Freddie have been piggy banks for politicians (primarily Democrat ones) and pretended to be both private and public institutions depending on what suited them in a particular instance.

Capitalism and free markets didn’t fail. The thumb of government was on the scale the whole time and markets were trying to react and protect themselves as best they could until it all came down.

There are solutions for all this. “Bankruptcy” (sorting good assets from bad ones and getting the value from the good), “foreclosure” (removing you from property you don’t own and aren’t keeping your word in paying for), and “renting” (the place you live when you can’t afford a house). Just let it happen and it will all get better a lot more quickly.

Extremist chatter: A report from the Tea Parties

As a new member of the Homeland Security watchlist, I went to two Tea Party events yesterday. One in Bellevue at lunch time and one in Seattle in the evening.
Thanks for the idea Rick Santelli.

Bellevue

The Bellevue event was on the lawn at City Hall and was really well attended for a mid-day event. Using the technique of counting a section of the crowd and then multiplying that across the area, I came up with about 1200 people. There were some empty pockets here and there though, so let’s call it about a thousand. I’ve not seen an estimate of the attendance in any of the press reports.

In general, I’m really opposed to Republican politicians glomming onto these events. Let’s not forget that they spent like drunken sailors while in power and that the first round of bailouts was a product of the Bush administration. (And, as someone at the event said, at least the drunken sailor is spending HIS OWN money.)
However, a Bellevue City Councilman, Conrad Lee, spoke. Mr. Lee is an immigrant (a legal one, thank you Mr. Lee) who came to the US 15 years ago. He said that at the time he was just looking for economic freedom and opportunity. He found that but he found something more that he hadn’t expected in the political freedom and the opportunity to make a difference. It was a great story and I love hearing from first generation (legal) immigrants.
Another speaker was Toby Nixon. Toby is also a Microsoft employee and happens to be an LDS guy. He is a former state legislator and now the head of a policy group. In his talk, he said, “There are four boxes that protect our freedom. The soap box. The ballot box. The jury box. And the ammo box. Preferably in that order.” (insert wild applause and hoo-uhs) He elaborated on each of the first three and one of the things I appreciated was his call to stop trying to get out of jury duty. I’ve never been sure why people do that. Do we want juries left in the hands of complete morons?

My hastily made sign read “Pay your own #!?@~$">#!?@~$ mortgage!” on one side and “Dude, where’s my country?” on the other.

I had to leave a little early to get back to work for a 1pm feature review meeting. Good time though.

Seattle
This was a family affair for us (except our oldest who is at college). We got to the event a little late. I was puzzled why the woman MC’ing was dressed as Alice (from Alice in Wonderland). As I write this, I’m just remembering the tea party scene, so I suppose it makes some kind of sense.
There were more people at the Seattle event, but still less than two thousand. I haven’t seen any estimates, but it was much more organized in the sense that they had sign up lists to stay involved going forward and “official” people in little yellow hard hats who were moving through the crowd doing various “official” things.
And it was in Seattle, so there were a few nuts. There was one anti-Walmart guy and one guy who was either for or against bioengineering, but we couldn’t really tell. He was dressed in a black facemask and goggles and had a cape made from a UW Huskies flag. <head scratching> Not sure what was up with that.

The worst part is there were a couple of people with really offensive signs. One depicted a Barak Obama figure with strings going up to a Star of David and a stereotypical “evil Jew” controlling him. That doesn’t even make any sense. I don’t think Obama has shown himself to be even a friend of Israel. In addition to being anti-Semitic and evil, it just doesn’t make any sense at all.
The other sign was a single “counter-protestor” with a reference to sexual activity that is the current way of talking about the Tea Parties on MSNBC. I would wager that more people saw this guy’s stupid sign at the Tea Party than were watching MSNBC in that same 2 hour timeslot nationwide.

Anyway, great energy in the crowd and a fun family event. Here we are being escorted away by the horse mounted riot police.*

* OK, not really, we just happened to be walking in front of them on the way to the car, but seemed funny they were there.

I think daughter #2 was hoping for some window smashing and car burning and may have felt a little disappointed when we all dispersed peacefully at the end.

So how about you? How’d you spend your April 15th?

What the heck was up with my ACT?

I was digging through some old transcripts and such.
Just a note that I keep carefully filed by stuffing them in the folder/frame thing that my Associates degree came in and stuck in a box in the garage with things like old plastic models I never built and my children’s blessing dresses. But I digress.
Anyway, so what do I find there but my ACT score report from when I was in high school.

For better or worse, when I took the ACT, I didn’t think it was a big deal. I don’t think my parents were even aware that I took it. I remember driving myself to the BYU campus (I’m pretty sure) on a Saturday morning (in October, apparently) and just taking the test cold with zero prep. I think I did pretty well, although I apparently had no more ability to rub two numbers together then than I do now. And what was up with that English score. I’ve always been a big fan of English and I use it almost daily. I’m actually planning a trip there. <sigh>

Now, again for better or worse, taking the ACT for my two oldest was a different matter. It involved lots of worrying, lots of practice tests, planning to take it once and then at least once more.
They’ve both done well and I’m very pleased with the effort they’ve put into it.

So the really interesting thing about this is not my scores or the fact my parents didn’t love me enough to make me take practice tests until I cried. (like I do)
No, the interesting thing was the ACT “Interest Inventory”.

Since I now work in the software industry, which is usually considered pretty technical, I appear to be woefully misplaced in the job market.
I mean I do pretty well for myself now, but apparently I would be KILLER in the Arts or Social Services. I really should reconsider a career as a case worker with troubled youth. Maybe I could straighten them up by making them take ACT practice tests over and over again while I fire live ammunition over their heads – just so they are prepared for test day.

My lovely and gracious assistant pointed out that tests like this are always out of step with what is really happening in the world and that “technical” to the ACT fuddy-duddies of 1985 probably meant internal combustion engines. She’s great about making me feel better about myself. (But I still got a higher ACT than her. <nyah-nyah>.)

How I got here – Part 2

OK, OK, finally getting back to the story line I started back on March 4 about how I got into the software and gaming biz. When we last left our hero, he had been learning about the valiant little Sinclair ZX-80.

The first computer I ever bought for myself was a Timex-Sinclair TS-1000. This was touted as the “first computer under $100”. I bought mine for about $97 at KMart in 1982. This was a slightly re-badged version of the Sinclair ZX-81, successor to my ZX-80. The key difference though was that where the old fashioned ZX-80 had a trifling 1k of RAM the TS-1000 had DOUBLE that! Yes! 2k of RAM.

Through a combination of saving my own money and begging my mom, I soon added the 16k RAM pack for another $49. I also bought my first computer flight simulator – Psion Flight Simulator. Man, I crashed that plane on approach about a thousand times at least. Oh, and we’ll see that Psion name pop up again in a later episode.

The Timex had some amazing features – like the string arrays that were missing from the ZX-80. It could also do crude graphics of an almost bitmap variety. The pixels were just really big – the display resolution was 64x44 pixels.

Tape me away
Like many early computers, a cassette tape recorder was the way you stored programs. This was just a regular old cassette recorder with a cable that connected the earphone and microphone jacks to the computer. To save, you’d press the record buttons on the recorder and the computer would send hellish screeching over the cable to the tape. To load, you’d press play and the computer would listen (sometimes) to the hellish screeching coming to it over the cable. This was not very reliable, so a common practice was to record things multiple times – in case one copy wouldn’t work. If you look at the little number in the circle on the tape picture, that was the number of copies of that program I saved there.
As you look through these tapes, you can see sort of the evolution of the program and my approach to source control and backups as I worked on the game. That’s kind of fun.

I remember there were some contests that Timex had that I entered. One was for the most interesting use of the database program. (I made an English/German flash card database.) Another was for the most interesting use of the spreadsheet program. (I made some kind of club budget tracking sheet.)
And I submitted a couple lame games to Timex magazines for publishing that were rejected.

Rejected!
After I honed my skills a bit, there was a whiff of a possibility of making money writing software. I began working on a kind of economic simulation game that started life as “Colony” on the tape above. Ultimately, it was renamed “Astro-Miner” – complete with a glitzy splash screen on start up. I submitted this to a game publisher and received my first rejection letter.
If you want to try out the glory that is the TS-1000, check out this emulator. Someone wrote the whole computer in Java.
I still have the TS1000 and last I checked it still works – although the RAM pack doesn’t. I used to keep it in my desk at work. And I still have a shoebox full of cassette software for it – including Psion Flight Simulator.

The one and only C-64
In 1983, Commodore came out with the amazing Commodore 64. It was a pricey $595. Not long afterward though, they had a trade-in promotion (I tried to find the ad on the web but couldn’t) – trade in any other computer or video game, working or not, and they’d send you a $100 rebate. Somehow, I convinced my mom and dad to pony up.
Oh man. I still remember the smell of the ozone when I plugged that thing in for the first time.
The C-64 was way ahead of anything else I’d worked with. Sprites, bitmap graphics, gobs of memory, stereo sound.

Sometime in here, when I was a 9th grader, my dad had a heart attack. He recovered, but that took time and being self-employed that meant there wasn’t much money coming in. Somehow, they still bought me a disk drive for the C-64.
Now, Commodore drives were “intelligent” drives. They basically had another computer inside them that was almost as powerful as the C-64 itself. This made them pretty neat, but also very expensive…several hundred dollars. This was a sacrifice for my family. I kind of knew that at the time, but when I think of it now it is huge. I’m guessing that drive was about the same as a house payment.

I worked on some games for the C-64, but I never really completed any that felt the way I had envisioned them. Although I still remember when my mind fully wrapped around what it means to animate a sprite. And I remember the first time I did a “walk cycle” that was synchronized with sound.
My mad skilz were just not up to delivering really good game experiences. HOWEVER, I did stumble on an economic niche and made my first “serious” money programming.
You might remember that in the mid 80’s there were little mom and pop video rental stores all over. This was pre-Blockbuster and pre-Red Box. A lot of times, you had to pay to join these stores and since a lot of people didn’t even own VCRs, they rented those too.
I started doing some consulting work for one local store and ended up writing some software to replace their index card-based paper system.
Then I sold the same software to a couple other stores.
Hey, this idea of writing something once and selling it multiple times…that’s pretty cool! Like printing money.
Here’s the surviving master copy with a prototype of the function key overlay that went with the software.

I had a Commodore 128D which was also awesome, and a couple different Amigas – awesome again. But I still have that original C-64 and disk drive and they still work. I could no more get rid of those than chop off my own arm. Seems like it would be ungrateful. After all, old timers say, “you dance with them that brung ya.”

If you want to try some of these vintage Commodore machines, check out the WinVice emulator. I’ve tried a lot of them and this is one of the best.

Seeing other people machines
While I was in high school, I had a chance to work with Apples in the computer class. I remember being in there actually on the day the shuttle Challenger blew up. Of course, it was passé at that time for people to watch the launches at school. Our class was doing an animation assignment. I think I was doing a juggling clown. Our teacher came in and said, “People always say they remember where they were when President Kennedy was shot. You’ll always remember you were in my class when the space shuttle blew up.”
We thought he was joking and one of the kids switched his animation work to a rudimentary space shuttle blowing up.
Anyway, Apple II’s sucked – and not just because they made the shuttle blow up.

I also remember being asked by one of the school counselors to have a look at a Data General One portable he was thinking of buying in like 1984-ish.

One last story for this installment
I basically ran my consulting business from the office of a teacher at the Payson High. I’d actually cut other classes and come there to work on the program (which was really pretty big), or maybe do my books, or talk on the phone with customers. Sometimes, I’d even leave school for an hour or two to meet with clients.
Man, I’d be so mad if I found out my kids were doing that. :-)

Next time: PCs, and handhelds, and consoles – oh my.

A netbook is in the house

My 16 year old daughter bought a laptop yesterday.
My first instinct when she said she told me the plan on IM was to try to talk her out of it. But then I reconsidered.
She as a regular job and probably works more than she should. She has quite a lot of money saved. Basically, she is buying the laptop with hear earnings from working a lot of hours during "mid-winter break". (a week off in February - just a crazy Washington thing)


So she bought an Acer Aspire One - pink of course. She paid about $325 including tax at Fry's.
These pictures don't give a good idea of how small this thing is because the mouse that is plugged into it is also very tiny. (it has a touchpad, but also includes a mouse, which is nice) Here's a video if you want a better look at the size - although this is a slightly different model.

It's a netbook, so no DVD drive. It weighs about 2 pounds, has a battery that seems to run over three hours (in our limited testing so far), and has a very nice screen. This model has a hard drive - which some netbooks don't. 160 gigabytes, so plenty of room for music, games, Office, even ripped movies.


This is a very cool machine. Nice and speedy. Good, if small, keyboard, fantastic screen, all the right ports and plugs for networking, memory cards, USB, etc.

Just what every young girl needs.