Baud Attitude

About fifteen years ago, I worked for the Peter Norton Computing Group down in Santa Monica, CA - specifically, on Norton Antivirus.

At the time, Norton was The Name when it came to PC utilities, and the team I worked with was an amazing bunch of people - extremely capable, dedicated and quite proud of the job they were doing and the product they were putting out.

So reading the comments to this story on Kotaku was kind of sad.  I knew that my former employer’s rep had suffered somewhat since my time there, but I didn’t realize it had gotten quite to this point.

Full disclosure: I use AVG these days, myself, because I’m too cheap to pay for yearly subscriptions.

So, today I am driving to school, and I’m at the point where one of our freeways merges into another and, because it’s rush hour, the merging lane slows to a dead stop.

I am a paranoid bastard, so I always give the guy in front of me considerable room, and I always watch the rear view mirror to make sure that the guy behind me has noticed that the lane is stopping.

Today, like pretty much every other time, the guy behind me comes to a complete stop.  I turn my attention back to the road ahead and wait for traffic to start flowing again.

The guy in front of me starts moving again, I put my foot on the gas, and that is when I hear someone plow into the car behind me at full speed.  No warning squeal of tires, just a WHAM that sounds like the world’s largest aluminum can being crushed.

I look in the rear view mirror and there is a car coming at me, driver’s side first.

It’s been hit hard enough to be spun 90 degrees.

It is no longer in control of its own destiny.

I’m not about to get hit BY a car - I’m about to get hit WITH a car.

Fortunately, at about this point, my foot found the MAKE CAR GO FASTER NOW pedal without any help from my conscious mind, and even more fortunately, the guy in front of me seems to have had exactly the same idea, so I do not plow into him in my effort to avoid making a two car accident into a three car pileup.

The car that got slammed into winds up off the side of the road facing back down the freeway, the car that did the slamming winds up off the side of the road, nose-to-nose with his victim, and at least a couple of cars that were behind stop and pull over.

I managed to mostly stop shaking by the time I made it to school, an hour later.

As soon as I am done with my degree, I am going to move somewhere where I do not need to have a car to live.  I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to manage this, but I’m going to do it.  This was the second time in less than a year that I’ve had a close call on the road, and I’m not looking forward to the next one.

I am not foolish enough to think that my luck will hold.

Not only did my Xbox 360 die (and, miraculously, return from the dead, albeit with a different serial #), but I’m a Washington Mutual customer and cnn is telling me that my bank just failed.

This may be an odd reaction, and all that, but, you know, when you’re kind of the weird guy that doesn’t have much in common with anyone else, you have to take common ground with the rest of humanity where you can find it.

Also I’m curious to see FDIC insurance actually in action.  It’s one of those things you take for granted, but you never really expect to see it working.

So I’ve run two sets of auctions lately, as I try to clear out space.

The first was mostly old games.  We’re talking, Apple II games, other early 8-bit micro stuff, TurboGrafx, Sega CD, that sort of stuff.

I had 12 auctions that got bids, and I got 11 Paypal payments the day the auctions ended.  The last guy took, oh, 24 hours to get his payment to me.

My only gripe was that I had a Canadian bidder who complained that it was more expensive to ship to Canada, which I will let slide because he also dropped a couple hundred bucks on mid-80s videogames.

By way of contrast, I then ran a bunch of auctions for, well, toys, mostly anime-related toys but some comic-book-related toys as well.  This time, I had 16 auctions get bids.

I’ve had:

7 actual payments.

1 bidder ask if he could pay me in “Transformers” figures instead of cash.

1 bidder ask if he can pay me next Tuesday, because that’s when he gets paid.

1 bidder wants to send me a money order because he “doesn’t do Paypal”

and 6 winning bidders that I haven’t heard from at all.

Lesson learned: Toy collectors are a pain in the arse.

Yesterday’s post was more than a little consumer-whorey, so I wanted to offer something up in my defense.

My first apartment, when I was 19 or so, was shared with Carmen Spray, who is, in addition to an accomplished fan artist, also very accomplished at living on the cheap.

We got a 2-bedroom apartment, I moved everything from my parents house into my bedroom, she moved the contents of her old studio into her bedroom, and we had a living room that was, well, pretty barren. We had a couch and a TV, a couple of drafting tables, and a whole lotta empty.

Anyway, to get back to the living on the cheap thing, one day she brings home a coffee table that she’s rescued from our complex dumpster, and suddenly we have an actual table that we can, you know, put food on, in the aforementioned barren front room.

When she moved out, I inherited the coffee table, and it’s lasted with me through the better part of two decades and several moves before being left out, today, in front of another dumpster in hopes that someone new will rescue it and give it a home.

And THAT’S what I replaced, with a shiny new LACK from Ikea, for the princely amount of $29.99.

I think I’m justified.

A weird little memorium today.

Back in the early 90s, there was no such thing as cheap public internet access. If you were a student, or worked at one of a very few large corporations, you could get access, otherwise you were generally out of luck.

The flip side of this is that, if you did have access, you had something quite unusual and rather special. Even back then, before the growth of the web, internet access meant that you had access to ftp sites and USENET newsgroups and gopher and a great many things that you couldn’t get through local BBSes or pay services like Compuserve.

I was just a high school student at the time, so I shouldn’t have been able to tap in to any of this and probably shouldn’t even have known it was out there.

On the other hand, I had unofficial access to an account at the local university, and that’s where I got my first exposure to the net. It was pretty intoxicating, and I spent far too many hours sucked into the comp.sys.* newsgroups. It’s no exaggeration to say that my career so far is owed to having early internet access and being able to tap into so much information that wasn’t otherwise available.

That ended when the Vax I had access to an account on got shut down in 1991. It was a pretty harsh separation - not as crippling, to be sure, as being netless would be today, but… I’d had, for a few months, a window into a much larger world, one which was still out there, and now it was closed, blinds pulled, and boards nailed across.

Then, a few months later, I ran into someone with the virtual equivalent of a claw hammer.

That gentleman’s name was David Casti, a student at the local college, and he wasin charge of a machine there called VECTOR. He also didn’t mind creating accountsfor people who, well, weren’t necessarily students. Life was good again, and although it didn’t last, it wasn’t too much longer before Delphi started offering reasonably inexpensive internet access, and not too much longer after that before the growth of freenets, and really not too much longer at all before the thought of not having access to the internet was actually unthinkable.

I probably wouldn’t remember any of this, except that while I was doing a searchfor something completely unrelated on my machine today, I ran across the following message from June 2, 1992:

SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE

OK, so the end is really here. I cannot guarantee that VECTOR will be
on the network after 5:00 p.m. June 5. I expect that it will remain
until the afternoon of June 10, but I make no guarantees and I don’t
want any misunderstandings about this. If you have any questions,
contact me.

Many of you have asked about access through other UO machines. Much to
my surprise (and your dismay) I have FAILED to find anyone who will
allow me to transfer my users to their system. I was surprised to find
such close-mindedness on the part of the university, especially because
the reasons they give are so lame: not enough time or money &c.

So, feel free to leech the network away these last few days. Please be
mindful of disk space. Currently there are 20 free megabytes. If they
fill up, no one will be able to log on except me, and I will be forced
to delete (what may appear to you to be random) files. A good guideline
would be to keep your off-line storage down to 5M. While you’re logged
on, feel free to use the disk, but before you log off prune your user
space.

Please keep in mind that I’m not falling off the edge of the Earth, and
although I won’t be able to help with network access right away, I may
be able to at some future point. Also, I will be happy to help anyone
who may find other ways to get network access. My account on OREGON will
probably remain active for a term or two, so I can receive mail at
dise@oregon.uoregon.edu.

Thank you all for treating me so well. I was happy to have provided
access — I’m just sorry it couldn’t have been for longer than a few months.

This service was provided (albeit unwittingly) by NeXT Computer and
the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at the University of Oregon.
Without their support, none of this would have been possible.

INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERR

16 years later, I’m going to bet that VECTOR is long since scrap, and that David has long since graduated and is hopefully doing well in whatever endeavours he’s decided to pursue. This whole thing, in fact, seems a bit quaint - these days, net access is universal, nearly free, and as impersonal as paying your water bill.

That’s what memoriums are for, though, for remembering things that - while they may not seem all that significant today - made a difference at the time.

So I keep hearing a song when I’m driving home from school, and it’s rather catchy, and so I finally went and looked it up on Google.

It’s apparently by the actress/singer who plays “Hannah Montana”, which is apparently all the rage with the slumber-parties-and-giggling-about-boys crowd.

From now on, I think I’ll keep the radio on the classic rock station.  Much less risk of me winding up in a record store trying to convince the clerk that “It’s not for me, it’s for my, uh, niece”