sisterly love

sisterly love
Originally uploaded by mandyvan

In the Fall of 2003 my children and I visited the Barn-N-Bunk Farm Market 11 miles from our home, armed with my new Sony MVC-CD500.

The kids had a great time together and I was able to snap some of my favorite photos on this outing. I had to look back at the pictures to remember all this (the point of the photos!) but we took a hayride, decorated cookies, shot apples in a giant slingshot, and got lost a few times in a corn maze.

In said corn maze, I was trailing a few steps behind the kids with the digital camera, my first without a viewfinder, just randomly hitting the shutter button along the way.

Fast forward 5 years later, I am reminiscing through over 17 gigs of photos from 2003 to now and I find the "October 2003" folder. I don't know if it's the 22-inch monitor I was viewing the pictures on (compared to the Mavica's 2.5 inch LCD) or the attention to detail I have developed over time, but there was something in one of the pictures I had not noticed until now.

Just the thought of this brings out emotions I didn't expect to affect me as much as they did. I understand the adage "actions speak louder than words" in a different way. The simple placement of my daughter's hand upon her brother's arm when a stranger is approaching...

Tech Stuff, The Beginning

Funny, as big a tech nerd as I am, I have only blogged about personal funny stuff.  Sorry about that, I am depriving you of my tech knowledge.  Then I thought, how do I blog about tech stuff? There is so much content out there, I just don't know where to begin or end.  

How about I begin at the beginning?

The summer between being in 5th and 6th grade, at the young age of 12, I came home from Girl Scout Camp (5 days away from home!) there was something new and shiny in our kitchen.  Dad had gone to Radio Shack and purchased a Tandy personal computer.  I can't remember the exact model number, but from looking at Google Images, it looks like possibly a 1000TX.  I do know we ran DOS as the operating system and booted it from a 3.5 inch floppy, running any programs in the 5.25 inch drive.  We didn't have very many programs for it, but I remember some games that I played, Demon's Forge and Marble Madness.  

We didn't really get full use out of our system until we purchased an internal modem.  Its speed was 300 baud, 300 bits per second.  Imagine watching letters appear on the screen slower that you can type, that's 300 baud :-)  A modem allowed our computer to call other computers over the phone line.

We could at least call some local BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems) and create a "handle" (think username) and password and read some forums and personal messages, maybe even chat with a SysOp (Systems Operator).  There were also opportunities to meet other BBS users, which today you might call a meetup, but we called them picnics or User Group meetings.  It does sound a lot like today's social networking on the Internet, but on the local calling area scale.  What is this about "local calling?"  Calling long distance on your telephone used to cost money and it wasn't cheap.

So, we did eventually get faster modems, which allowed for a whole sentence to come across the screen in beautiful orange text.  This allowed for more "research" to be done, downloading of Freeware/Shareware programs, making greater use of our machine.  I taught my self programming in BASIC, moderated some forums, and eventually helped run a few BBS's.  This was all before the Internet and home ISPs existed.  I did use some other protocols before http, such as ftp, frame, vax, Gopher, Kermit, and possibly a few others. Lots of these were run by colleges and had toll-free numbers, one in Utah I remember, and Indiana State University, all connecting by modem to some type of information system.

This modem/BBS stuff continued until after I graduated high school, when, BAM, out busted the World Wide Web.  There's a lot that happened in between and after to bring us to now, but this is a good start for my first tech-related blog. More to come!

Shirts!

From someone that blogs about geek shirts, you know I love shirts. Our good buddies AJ and Gary Vaynerchuk have a "T-Shirt Search Engine" site startup.  Check it out!!  Pleasedress.Me

Tees at pleasedress.me!

Blog Schmlog

Runnin around like craZy right now setting up some accounts, but wanted to post something... this is day 2 off from the Ear Infection from Heck, but I am excited to get back to work tomorrow.  

Uh, did I just say that? I better go take my temperature and make sure all these medications aren't making me hallucinate.