"I hate your blog. You own a dog, and you feed it.
You post about it. I get to read it.
Plus: five paragraphs on the socks you bought
and your thoughts on whether Nicole Ritchie's hot or not.
You got no reason to be typing, yet you persist.
Hit each key with your fist till you punch out your top ten list
of all the things that ever happened in your life.
Number one: met Michael Jackson's second wife.
Number two: got Curly on the Which Stooge Are You
Poll, as the GIF proves. Click for the link-through!
Three: saw puppy pictures on a web page,
kittens in a nest egg. The idea gestated:
Why not open up your own?
So you bought the account and yet I hope you don't
put the payments in on it every month like they want,
'cause then you'll disappear off the internet, haunt
just the Wayback Machine like a ghost.
And I won't be like, "How come you don't post??"
I promise I won't."
MC Frontalot hates your blog.
Spend about a week eating Cheetos, cutting your fingernails, and eating sugary snacks directly over your laptop, getting that crap all over (and between) the keys. Also be sure to sneeze directly on the screen (bonus points for having a mouth full of soda at the time). If you don't have the heart to tell them no directly, maybe you can indirectly dissuade them from wanting to use it. Plus if you get hungry during class you can always dig out some of those Cheeto bits...
It's always a fun morning when you discover an interesting news story by being Slashdotted. I am hosting the ECCC picture that was linked to earlier in this thread.
Like others, I question the definition of "LAN party." I pictures I took were at the Emergency Chicagoland Commodore Convention of 2006 while I was there promoting my new (at the time) book Commodork, and there were definitely LAN connections running to and from some of the sixty-fours there.
As for letting go of this old hardware... why? There are so many new neat gadgets coming out for the old beige box that it's hard not to remain interested in them. The new wave of drives using SD cards, including the 1541-III and the 1541 Ultimate, are expanding the machine's abilities and convenience even further.
Hey all -- Rob O'Hara here, author of Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie. Right off the bat, let me say thanks to Jason Scott for the positive and fair I think he was fair in his assessment. He was right to state that there are a few rough spots throughout the book. Although I do have a degree in Journalism, there's no doubt a few of those bumps could have been smoothed out with an editor's assistance.
A lot of people have compared Jason's BBS Documentary with my book, although to me they are two completely opposite approaches on the same subject. Jason attempted to document the entire history of BBSes by interviewing hundreds of people. Through the eyes of many, his viewers can deduce what it must've been like for individual users. My book takes the opposite approach -- by telling one guy's BBS experience, you can then multiply that story and get a feeling for what it must've been like for other people in other area codes. As I state in the book, there was nothing particularly special about my area code (405) and my memories aren't any more imporant than any of yours -- I just wrote mine down.
The greatest thing about this whole experience has been reading all the comments that have been either e-mailed directly to me or posted here on Slashdot. There is something reassuring about the thought that halfway across the country, someone else was experiencing the exact same things I was as a teenager. There are so many stories and experiences that we all shared, which is incredible considering we didn't talk! One that has been mentioned to me multiple times is, "remember when sysops used to take their phone off the hook Christmas Day so that they wouldn't have to deal with all the kiddies who got new modems from Santa?" It's those things I get a real kick out of, things that seem to have developed simultaneously across the country (or even world). I also love all the comments from all the "first time posters" this has brought out. It's great!
I don't know why BBS memories are so vivid to all of us, but they are. You would be amazed at the details that come out in the e-mails I've received. People rattle off their FidoNet node like it was their social security number. I still remember dozens of BBS phone numbers... and yet I almost missed my wife's birthday last year. When someone mentions the name of an old Commodore game to me, sometimes I can still come up with the number I had written on the disk label. With 700 disks I could usually remember where any particular disk was, and yet I can never remember if the microwave at work cooks microwave popcorn in two (or is it three) minutes. My brain's full of nostalgia -- overflowing, perhaps.
As to those who thing that 33 years old is too young to publish one's memoirs, I completely agree. "Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie" isn't "the complete memoirs of Rob O'Hara" -- instead, it's a collection of my experiences and memories of my local BBS scene. I feel fairly confident that there will not be any future earth-shattering developments in my local BBS scene, and that it's a pretty safe story to document "in the past tense" now. There would be no advantage I can see to delaying the documentation and publication of these stories. And as for the "why are glorifying an old, pirating weasel," comments, well, guilty as charged. My book is a time capsule of that era, and as Jason mentioned in his review, not all the stories are pretty. There are more than a couple in the book that I'm not proud of, but I felt compelled to include the good and the bad. I wanted to portray modeming how I remembered it. Yes, there were phreakers, and people trading codez, and cc#s, and all that stuff, and that's all in the book. When retelling some of those tales I hoped to document it without glorifying it. So am I proud to say I stole a lot of people's software back in the day? No. But did it happen? Yes. Would I find the humor in finding a torrent of my own book? Probably. Karma's a bitch.
Agreed... I'm one of the nobodies who contributed to the book. I wrote a couple of the MAME related articles, and there are a couple of pictures of one of my MAME cabinets included within the book. When the final copy arrived in the mail I was super excited to see my final articles in print, but shortly afterwards I read the book from cover to cover. There are a lot of great articles in there!
I almost had this happen to me with Register.com. I got an e-mail from them stating that my old domain was about to be reregistered for me, and billed to my credit card. This is a domain name that hasn't been used in over a year. When I got the e-mail, I was notified that I had "three days to log in to their site and turn off automatic renewal." Fortunately I caught it in time, but it sounds like the same type of deal to me.
Apparently once you buy something on a credit card you now have to "opt out" from future purchases? I can't wait until a car dealer shows up at my house with a new car because I didn't opt out of buying a new one each year when I bought my last one.
In Ready 2 Rumble II (Dreamcast, PS2), if your console's date is set to 12/25, you will have additional characters/outfits to choose from, including Snowman and Elf.
As a GP32 owner, I'd say watching movies on a handheld is a bit overrated. First of all, you have to buy and install MoviePark (which, btw, has pulled their product from online sales -- if you don't own it now, you can't get it). Then, you've got to compress your video to Divx 4.12. Once that's finished, you've got to copy that file to your GP32 SMC.
Other than the "neat-o" factor, it seems pretty worthless to me. If I've got an hour to kill, I'd much rather play some C64/Atari ST/Atari 800/Atari 2600 roms than watch a movie on a 320x240 4 inch screen.
... you could hook a car battery up to the back of this thing as well. Extend your game over the time limit and the box shocks the pee right out of you.
I recently had not one, but both of my personal vehicles broken into in my own driveway. From one car, they stole approximately $2000 in stereo equipment. From the other, they stole my laptop bag, which besides my laptop, had my cell phone, palm pilot, and a whole pile of goodies crammed in there.
I couldn't even get the police to come out to my house for the police report. They took the list of items over the phone, and mailed me a copy of the report a week later. So much for crime scene investigation.
Three months ago, my sister's house was broken into by my cousin. We gave the police his name and they wouldn't even pick him up for questioning. When he was later arrested (parole violation), they asked him if he did it; he said no, and they dropped the issue.
Those two incidents have shattered any notions I had about how law enforcement works. I think the laws are there to keep the good and semi-good people honest, and to punish the "bad" people when they turn themselves in or fall into their lap.
My company is so broke we didn't even get free drink tickets this year for our company Christmas party. $5 bucks a head, and no drink tickets.
That broke company? LOCKHEED MARTIN.
Let's see, one Stealth Bomber = approximately 1.8 million company hams...
Slashdot Mirror
"I hate your blog. You own a dog, and you feed it. You post about it. I get to read it. Plus: five paragraphs on the socks you bought and your thoughts on whether Nicole Ritchie's hot or not. You got no reason to be typing, yet you persist. Hit each key with your fist till you punch out your top ten list of all the things that ever happened in your life. Number one: met Michael Jackson's second wife. Number two: got Curly on the Which Stooge Are You Poll, as the GIF proves. Click for the link-through! Three: saw puppy pictures on a web page, kittens in a nest egg. The idea gestated: Why not open up your own? So you bought the account and yet I hope you don't put the payments in on it every month like they want, 'cause then you'll disappear off the internet, haunt just the Wayback Machine like a ghost. And I won't be like, "How come you don't post??" I promise I won't." MC Frontalot hates your blog.
Spend about a week eating Cheetos, cutting your fingernails, and eating sugary snacks directly over your laptop, getting that crap all over (and between) the keys. Also be sure to sneeze directly on the screen (bonus points for having a mouth full of soda at the time). If you don't have the heart to tell them no directly, maybe you can indirectly dissuade them from wanting to use it. Plus if you get hungry during class you can always dig out some of those Cheeto bits ...
It's always a fun morning when you discover an interesting news story by being Slashdotted. I am hosting the ECCC picture that was linked to earlier in this thread. Like others, I question the definition of "LAN party." I pictures I took were at the Emergency Chicagoland Commodore Convention of 2006 while I was there promoting my new (at the time) book Commodork, and there were definitely LAN connections running to and from some of the sixty-fours there. As for letting go of this old hardware ... why? There are so many new neat gadgets coming out for the old beige box that it's hard not to remain interested in them. The new wave of drives using SD cards, including the 1541-III and the 1541 Ultimate, are expanding the machine's abilities and convenience even further.
Hey all -- Rob O'Hara here, author of Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie. Right off the bat, let me say thanks to Jason Scott for the positive and fair I think he was fair in his assessment. He was right to state that there are a few rough spots throughout the book. Although I do have a degree in Journalism, there's no doubt a few of those bumps could have been smoothed out with an editor's assistance.
... and yet I almost missed my wife's birthday last year. When someone mentions the name of an old Commodore game to me, sometimes I can still come up with the number I had written on the disk label. With 700 disks I could usually remember where any particular disk was, and yet I can never remember if the microwave at work cooks microwave popcorn in two (or is it three) minutes. My brain's full of nostalgia -- overflowing, perhaps.
A lot of people have compared Jason's BBS Documentary with my book, although to me they are two completely opposite approaches on the same subject. Jason attempted to document the entire history of BBSes by interviewing hundreds of people. Through the eyes of many, his viewers can deduce what it must've been like for individual users. My book takes the opposite approach -- by telling one guy's BBS experience, you can then multiply that story and get a feeling for what it must've been like for other people in other area codes. As I state in the book, there was nothing particularly special about my area code (405) and my memories aren't any more imporant than any of yours -- I just wrote mine down.
The greatest thing about this whole experience has been reading all the comments that have been either e-mailed directly to me or posted here on Slashdot. There is something reassuring about the thought that halfway across the country, someone else was experiencing the exact same things I was as a teenager. There are so many stories and experiences that we all shared, which is incredible considering we didn't talk! One that has been mentioned to me multiple times is, "remember when sysops used to take their phone off the hook Christmas Day so that they wouldn't have to deal with all the kiddies who got new modems from Santa?" It's those things I get a real kick out of, things that seem to have developed simultaneously across the country (or even world). I also love all the comments from all the "first time posters" this has brought out. It's great!
I don't know why BBS memories are so vivid to all of us, but they are. You would be amazed at the details that come out in the e-mails I've received. People rattle off their FidoNet node like it was their social security number. I still remember dozens of BBS phone numbers
As to those who thing that 33 years old is too young to publish one's memoirs, I completely agree. "Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie" isn't "the complete memoirs of Rob O'Hara" -- instead, it's a collection of my experiences and memories of my local BBS scene. I feel fairly confident that there will not be any future earth-shattering developments in my local BBS scene, and that it's a pretty safe story to document "in the past tense" now. There would be no advantage I can see to delaying the documentation and publication of these stories. And as for the "why are glorifying an old, pirating weasel," comments, well, guilty as charged. My book is a time capsule of that era, and as Jason mentioned in his review, not all the stories are pretty. There are more than a couple in the book that I'm not proud of, but I felt compelled to include the good and the bad. I wanted to portray modeming how I remembered it. Yes, there were phreakers, and people trading codez, and cc#s, and all that stuff, and that's all in the book. When retelling some of those tales I hoped to document it without glorifying it. So am I proud to say I stole a lot of people's software back in the day? No. But did it happen? Yes. Would I find the humor in finding a torrent of my own book? Probably. Karma's a bitch.
Thank you all for all the kind words. If you e
Their DRM consists of a message that says, "please download responsibly and do not share PDFs." They're no Sony, that's for sure. Rob "Flack" O'Hara.
Agreed ... I'm one of the nobodies who contributed to the book. I wrote a couple of the MAME related articles, and there are a couple of pictures of one of my MAME cabinets included within the book. When the final copy arrived in the mail I was super excited to see my final articles in print, but shortly afterwards I read the book from cover to cover. There are a lot of great articles in there!
Rob "Flack" O'Hara
http://www.digitpress.com/ | http://www.robohara.com/
I almost had this happen to me with Register.com. I got an e-mail from them stating that my old domain was about to be reregistered for me, and billed to my credit card. This is a domain name that hasn't been used in over a year. When I got the e-mail, I was notified that I had "three days to log in to their site and turn off automatic renewal." Fortunately I caught it in time, but it sounds like the same type of deal to me.
Apparently once you buy something on a credit card you now have to "opt out" from future purchases? I can't wait until a car dealer shows up at my house with a new car because I didn't opt out of buying a new one each year when I bought my last one.
In Ready 2 Rumble II (Dreamcast, PS2), if your console's date is set to 12/25, you will have additional characters/outfits to choose from, including Snowman and Elf.
As a GP32 owner, I'd say watching movies on a handheld is a bit overrated. First of all, you have to buy and install MoviePark (which, btw, has pulled their product from online sales -- if you don't own it now, you can't get it). Then, you've got to compress your video to Divx 4.12. Once that's finished, you've got to copy that file to your GP32 SMC.
Other than the "neat-o" factor, it seems pretty worthless to me. If I've got an hour to kill, I'd much rather play some C64/Atari ST/Atari 800/Atari 2600 roms than watch a movie on a 320x240 4 inch screen.
... you could hook a car battery up to the back of this thing as well. Extend your game over the time limit and the box shocks the pee right out of you.
I recently had not one, but both of my personal vehicles broken into in my own driveway. From one car, they stole approximately $2000 in stereo equipment. From the other, they stole my laptop bag, which besides my laptop, had my cell phone, palm pilot, and a whole pile of goodies crammed in there.
I couldn't even get the police to come out to my house for the police report. They took the list of items over the phone, and mailed me a copy of the report a week later. So much for crime scene investigation.
Three months ago, my sister's house was broken into by my cousin. We gave the police his name and they wouldn't even pick him up for questioning. When he was later arrested (parole violation), they asked him if he did it; he said no, and they dropped the issue.
Those two incidents have shattered any notions I had about how law enforcement works. I think the laws are there to keep the good and semi-good people honest, and to punish the "bad" people when they turn themselves in or fall into their lap.
Let's see, one Stealth Bomber = approximately 1.8 million company hams ...