sat 30th - 1030ish
The gates book is pretty good reading about the early years of microcomputing (mid 70s). my older brother built a homebrew computer back then, pretty much from scratch and ideas in Byte magazine, and did all the necessary hardware design and machine level programming to make it work, to the point that he could play chess against it, typing on a home made keyboard, watching on an old b/w TV, with the programs stored on cassette tape that he played with mom's music practice tape deck. He still has the computer in it's later incarnation after the addition of a floppy disk drive (which was big bucks in the late 70s). He never did have much interest in getting rich, and is still working for a company that folks he knew in college started 25 years ago.
A very few people have both the ability and the ambition to make a lot of money...many of us with the ability are quite content to have enough to live on. Life's too short.
I also got to spend some time today with oldest son playing with the "cop car", which is a 10 year old Ford sedan we got very cheap from a good friend about a year ago. Son thinks the stereo is lacking in bass (me too, being a Zeppelin fan), so I rememberd that I had some speakers and an amp in a shed somewhere that had been in another car about 15 yrs ago. I found them...and we ran some wires in the cop car to the trunk, and fired it up, and it worked ok for a few minutes, then started cutting out. Then I remembered why I took the system out of the other car. oh well. But now we may spend $150 at wally world on an amp and subwoofer to put in th cop car, although mom isn't too keen on the idea. maybe I'll use business money for it....not that I have a lot of that to play with. maybe I ought to do some work on some cars and get more!
Not many folks out on this night before haloween. It's clear and crisp out and an almost full moon stil. Feels like winter. brrrr.
wife rented a movie about supersizing, I watched it for a bit, but it was too scary all the health problems the guy was having after eating McDs 3 meals a day for not even a month. Makes ya think. ewwww.
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