myschyf | (no subject)

Jean Claude Van Damme is creepy . And smarmy, and icky.

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Via

filkertom, Message to the religious right - this isn't just about marriage, it's about history

I keep hearing all of this nonsense about us lgbts attacking people, about us using intimidation and violence to oppress people, about us somehow being ugly aggressors.

Newt Gingrich (who wrote the book on deceptive messaging during his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives) actually accused us of being "secular fascists."

Gingrich's attack on us seem to be the prevailing theme with those on the other side of the Proposition 8 argument.

And I think there needs to be some historical perspective on this matter.

Absolutely worth the read.

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Via

dafydd, The instant rimshot.

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And now, I happily close the onscreen keyboard and go back to typing on the real thing. Mondo thanks to

darthgeek for bringing home a replacement.

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A few weeks ago, Sam and I were discussing computers, and I was telling her about my first computer lab, and then about my first computer. I explained that there was no mouse, no e-mail, no *colors* on the monitor (okay, black and yellow are colors, but y'all know what I mean). I basically had Word Perfect and a handfull of ASCI games. Oh, and Blockout. And, I was *very* happy with it all.

The child blinked at me and said "You didn't even have FIREFOX?!". I explained that not only did I not have firefox (nor did firefox actually exist yet), I didn't have a 'net connection nor did most people *and* my computer was a major hand-me-down which wouldn't run Windows 3.5.

I'm *still* not sure she believes me. ;)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You'll have to tell her about mainframe computers and punch-card programming some time.

If you really want her to not believe you, you should've mentioned that you didn't have a hard drive and had to run everything off floppies. :-)

And really fast expensive computers had two floppy drives so you didn't have to take the OS floppy out to put the one with the apps on it, in.

Okay, now I've got "When I Was a Boy" as sung by Steve McDonald running through my head.

We did our computing in pri-moooorrrr-dial darkness.

Our relational tables were made of wood!

I dreamed of having a relational table.

Heck, when I started computing in the mid 70's, individual people didn't even have computers. Forget mice and browsers, we didn't even have screens. We had punch card decks as input and reports as output. < old-fogey > And we were glad to get it too! < /old-fogey >

The first computer game I played (even before Adventure) was Ascii-graphics Star Trek on a Tele-type terminal at 300 baud, all print on paper. It was remote to a computer at another college because the PDP-8 my college had wouldn't support it.

*snerk* Alex looks at me funny when I told her the school computers had phones you had to turn an actual dial on. Not only that, in order to get to the mainframe, we had to sick the receiver into a two holed thing (acoustic coupler) and then you were lucky if it worked (line noise) she thought I was smoking crack ;)

Damned kids... Get off my lawn!! ;)