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A couple of years ago, I did the Tux pattern (from The Pumpkin Lady). The photos of it are here:
Tux Pumpkin closeup
Front door 2003
This year, I decided that Potter (the ‘Yellow Dog’) would be the subject:
Potter Pumpkin with light
Potter Pumpkin a bit darker
Potter Pumpkin at the front door
Happy Halloween!
Being the geek that I am, I like showing photos of my nerdiness. Such as these:
I don’t remember when that photo was shot, but it used to be on here.
Here’s a description of the machines in that photo:
This is the first machine I learned to program on. It had 5 languages, but I mostly used Waterloo and Commodore basic. It can actually make (pitched) noises by POKEing the right values into the memory address that controls the oscillator. I managed to surprise my programming teacher by handing in an assignment that played a little melody while it scrolled text in tiny window above an image of a face… not impressive by today’s standards, but it was nifty at the time.
A friend of mine spent $6000 CND on this machine when it was new, and couldn’t find anyone to give it to several years later. Unfortunately, the dual floppy drive has died first and was tossed. Then, sadly, after it stopped turning on and my kids couldn’t use it as a typing toy, I finally got rid of it. It looks so sad in that photo, and reminds me of the IKEA lamp commercial.
My first Palm was a Palm IIIe, but it died a mysterious death. Fortunately, I bought an extended warranty on it, and the IIIxe was what I got when I brought the corpse in. I love my Palm, and I would be lost without it. I use it to keep track of my appointments and contact list mostly, but also for stuff like this. As you can see in the header above and on that showcase page, I also used to use this Palm as a serial terminal for my Yellowdog briQs. It raised a lot of eyebrows in the machine room and certainly got me geek cred.
My RIM Blackberry was basically an expensive pager. I didn’t really like it other than I could read my email from anywhere (and that really wasn’t a good thing. The desktop software was windoze only, and trying to find the right version to use is a PITA. There are nowhere near as many apps for this thing as there are for my Palm. I used to carry this and my Palm, which was a major pain. Eventually, I convinced my boss to let me upgrade my Palm to a Tungsten W (which I still have, but haven’t turned on in ages). As soon as I had a Palm with phone and SMS capabilities, I turned the Crackberry off and it sat on the shelf during the rest of it’s data plan. Since then, I’ve also had a Treo 600 and now a Treo 650.
My first *nix like OS that I used regularly (other than the shell account at my ISP and for CS courses), was NeXTSTEP. For it’s time, it really kicked ass! The thing I like most about it is that it is a really nice looking machine. The dumb thing about it is you can’t turn off the display, so if you find one today, chances are it is faded and hard to read. Fortunately, this one is in pretty good condition. I haven’t turned it on in a while, mostly because I haven’t found the Y2K patches for it. So when I set the date on it, it thinks it’s 1972 or something. Like my SuperPET, I don’t think I’ll be getting rid of this thing any time soon.
Of all of my Macs that I’ve ever had this one was my favorite, and so far, I’ve owned the following: IIfx, LC475, Quadra605, LC575, Quadra840AV, PPC6100, PPC7200, Beige G3/233, Powerbook G3/233 (Wallstreet), PowerMac G4 (many single and dual CPU models), many different iMacs, a Mac Mini (G4), PowerMac G5, Powerbook G4 (12″ and 15″), and used many others. I would recommend this machine to anyone despite the fact that upgrading the hard drive is a major pain:
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I had 3 OSes installed on it: YellowDog Linux (default), MacOS 9.2 and MacOS X. I’ve used MacOS X for a grand total of about 1 hour, and I sometimes used MacOS 9 when I was doing location recordings with a MOTU828 and Digital Performer. Other than that, I pretty much used Linux 95% of the time and YDL ran on it beautifully.
In its day, this machine was very cool. It has an 8086 CPU with 256k of RAM, an orange/black screen and two 5-1/4″ floppy drives. I used to have the MS-DOS 3.x floppies and WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. This was my first introduction to the Intel world (after my C-64, and just before my Amiga2000). For the time, it was a great machine, but it has since paved the way for the SuperPet and warmed up a space in the landfill for it.
This was main machine at home, and it had one operating system installed on it - YellowDog Linux. At the time I also had another one just like it in my studio which runs only MacOS 9 (and Digital Performer). The studio machine is now a dual G4/800 MHz and my other main audio box is a Dual 2GHz G5. Believe it or not, this very box was once www.mcgill.ca.
In the photo, the machine is running WindowMaker - an X windows window manager that emulates NeXTSTEP - which is pretty ironic considering what is right NeXT to it (sorry for the bad pun). I had forgotten how nice NeXTSTEP really was. I ran WindowMaker for a while as my default window manager, but now I’m a total KDE addict.
This was my first synth and was a birthday present from my Dad. It has a built in sampler and sequencer, and 8 outputs. Pretty spiffy for its day, and I toured all over the place with it back in my rock/funk/pop days. My other synths are in the studio, but this one is at home to use to teach my sons music (and for them to play with). Now it sits on top of my digital piano which wass temporarily in the studio as well.
My first home computer…. ahh those were the days. I still have my C64 in a closet somewhere, but I was using the monitor up until very recently as a TV. It has a composite video input, so I simply hooked the video out of my VCR into it, and used the VCR as the receiver. The thing is almost 20 years old and it still works beautifuly. Like my NeXT I can’t seem to part with it, despite the fact that there is a C64 emulator for OS X that I would be far more likely to use than the real thing.
This next photo:
Geekroom v2
was taken some time afterward, probably shortly after I upgraded to the Powerbook G4 12″ 867 MHz, which you can see there as well as my Tungsten W. The Tungsten was a nice Palm, but a crappy phone. The Powerbook was a total lemon, and the worst Mac I ever had. In that photo, you can see I was installing Red Hat on the 1U machine sitting on top of the C-64 monitor (see, the monitor was still useful after all!).
The next version:
Geekroom v3
Here you can see that my main G4 tower was joined by a Dell, and a Rev. B iMac (which I named ‘Douglas’ after my favorite author Douglas Adams). The Dell was a PIII 550, and it was my home desktop machine until the summer of 2006. Both the G4 and the Dell were running Linux (YDL and Fedora Core respectively). In the photo, you can just barely see the KVM that I used to switch between them. Douglas ran MacOS 8 which was the last version of MacOS that could play Starship Titanic properly. I still use the iMac for YDL testing.
These next two shots are a little closer to how things are now:
The workstation on the right is a G5 Dual 2GHz with a P4 1.6 GHz file server sitting next to it which is running headless and is my home file server. The G5 runs MacOS X and is primarily my wife’s machine. Other than the regular email/web stuff, she uses it for doing audio editing, composing, music notation and pre-mixes. She now has far better speakers (Yamaha MSP-5s) than the ones in that photo. The workstation on the left is my current desktop machine, a Pentium D 2.8GHz.
The drawers under my desk and between both desks were taken from the old desk in versions 1-3, and it’s funny how it just fit there perfectly. The NeXT Machine is still there, and a tiny corner of it is visible in the top right corner of the first photo.
An old photo of my desktop. I’ve since gotten a new powerbook, monitor is now an LCD, and iMac is a testing machine for YDL.
Ok, so this posting was just an excuse to upload an image so that I could test that Wordpress-mu was installed correctly. I’ll put up more interesting things soon.
