We used to crowdsource flashmobds over a BSD 3.5 or so PDP-11 at the University of California Santa Cruz.
It had what we would now regard as quite primitive, but really was quite a well thought out message board that we just called "The B Forum", as ucscb.ucsc.edu was an "Open Access Computer", free for the asking my anyone who could flash a reasonably decent color photo copy of their cousin's campus ID.
At the time that was regarded as quite forward thinking. UCSC had maybe six vax 11/780, but consider that the MS-DOS 80386 at like 16 MHz was widely advertised as being the equivalent of "One VAX MIP".
"Millions of Instructions Per Second". I once got a guided tour of the MIPS corporate headquarters, where our guide card-keyed us into a test lab. We all puzzled over this six-inch tall heat sink that looked just like Manhattan from a great distance.
"Oh everybody knows we're working on a Ten MIPS product for next year."
So tell me - I'm typing this on my Mom's 32-Bit PowerPC G4 iMac at 1.2 GHz over a 56k dialup modem.
How many GIPS does YOUR Turgid Phallus have? Better overclock your erect member, or your going to come home in the middle of the afternoon one fine day to find your main squeeze doing the dirty with my _TIPS_ smack in the middle of your ceramic tile kitchen floor!
We all chatted via the b forum with 24x80 2400 Baud Glass TTYs. I mean like not even the Televideo TVI910+ I blew half my Summer job savings on so I wouldn't have to hang out at Caltech's oubliette - oh sorry, my mad, I meant to say "computer center" - with all the other acne infested poptartivores.
I mean I down my own acne and all-poptart diet but that didn't imply I wanted to also smell my classmates from the next workstation.
So anyway I dialed in via my $1200.00 2400 Baud Hayes Smartmodem, to learn that we are all going to meet up at midnight at the Lyon's restaurant - rather upscale from Denny's, but not as upscale as Coco's or Shari's for coffee, ice cream and to hang out and chat about how to find all the Magic Mushrooms that grow all over that Damn campus, and have so grown since long before the Dawn of Humanity.
So at like 11:55 or so, suddenly there's no empty spaces in the parking light, so I park my ancient, used, beat up Toyota Corona mid-sized station wagon on the street.
By 12:05 PM there were 100 UCSC students who all wanted to sit together.
They work up their entire staff at home out of their warm, comfortable beds, ordered them in for like two hours of overtime, then rearranged all the tables and chairs into one long, narrow conference table.
I don't clearly recall but I expect I myself ordered one single scoop of ice cream.
Most ordered just one coffee as it had a bottomless carafe - ie. Infinite Free Coffe Refills.
Those who were savvy investors, rather unlike young gentlemen like myself had the wherewithal to order BOTH coffee AND icecream.
I can't recall any of out of our 110 Starving Students ordering anything else, let alone a proper meal.
I know all about what it's like to have to work for a living, so I left maybe a fifty cent tip.
Most of my colleagues were not too poor to tip, nor were they cruel nor satisfied with their service.
No they were to ignorant to know they were expected to tip.
As we started to leave, leaving droplets of melted ice cream and little puddles of spilled coffee all over the place the manager walked right up to ME - what did I do? I'm NOT the perp! I'm a patsy! Lissen Sweet Lady I'm an innocent man ya got the wrong guy and shouted:
DON'T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!
What I'd like to see:
An App that had a GUI as well as crisp responsiveness and well-thought-out usability just like Hacker News, but without an actual webserver.
No, one could connect to other "MyCombinator" members by emailing each other, say, a hash or so, then reading that email in Apple's Mail App.
The hash would look something like:
http://mycombinator.co/?new-userid=a3B7cccd
That would bring up a page that would preselect just the text "a3B7cccd". One copies it to the clipboards, pastes it into MyCombinator, then whoever is responsible for sending that has joins your board and you join theirs just as if you and they were the only two members of MyCombinator.
Now I do fully understand that I just popped a billion dollar product concept, but I'm very tired and the reason I am buck naked as I write this is that my monkey will simply not permit me to sleep unless I spank him first.
I at first thought that the Oligarchs were organized crime kingpins.
Much of the former Communist world's grief and the Capitalist world's challenge is that The G-dless Communies had to struggle so desperately just to have any hope whatsoever of survival.
This because Ronald Reagan in particular made his intentions to transform all of Mother Russian into a fine, radioactive mist in the stratosphere.
The very height of the cold war was not at all the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis as most Americans incorrectly believe, but 1981 or so when my father, a US Naval Civil Service Electrical Engineer, just happened to not come home from work. He didn't call to say he'd miss supper, we all figured that there were some fires he had to put out so we were unconcerned.
I don't recall the date but it was around summertime as it's quite nice to be outdoors even late at night in Fairfield, California.
About five miles to the east of our home at the time lay Travis Air Force Base. That's the largest USAF Airlift Command Base on the West Coast. Edwards Airforce Base in California's High Desert just Northwest of the Mojave is larger, but isn't meant for "production use" like fighting wars, just for experimental work like when a new model of fighterplane has a total landing gear brake failure upon touchdown.
Twenty miles to our west, on the otherside of a wide, moderately high but not really tall range of hills, lay Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, where my father was working that night, and was at the time the main submarine maintenance, repair and nuclear refueling shipyard.
So one night Mom looks puzzled steps out the front door then asks my sister and I to join her in the front yard.
"Mike?"
"Jeannie?"
"Mom, those are air raid sirens!"
I had not the clue that they even existed in our neighborhood. They were all around our subdision, about a quarter mile on each side so I couldn't locate any but I figured they had to be hidden inside the streetlight poles.
Oddly no one EVER mentioned this event to me at any time. I don't know why.
Consider that the Soviets, East Germans, Polish &c. were a lot more fearful of getting brutally murdered by us Freedom-Loving G-d Fearing American Citizens than we were of them.
This the Soviets, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese and the North Koreans bet the farm on weaponry as well as provisions for their military personnel.
Spies too, lots of spies, not just to spy on us, but on each other as the Soviets and the Chinese were not Allies, rather "Fellow Travels" in that they were going to the same destination but hated each other with a passion. The People's Republic of China actually invaded North Vietnam after South Vietnam fell in 1975.
There were also quite a lot of secret police, in part to keep a watch out for Capitalist espionage but also to keep an eye out for anti-Communist citizens of Communist nations.
Putin worked for most of his adult life until the Soviet breakup as a KGB clandestine agent in East Germany.
He knew damn well that his only hope of not starving to death under ten feet of Generalissimo Winter after his, uh, "retirement" was to enjoy his Golden Years as a Moscow Taxi Driver!
I AM ABSOLUTELY SERIOUS.
So when Communism fell, everyone who could grab hold of something of value did so - with a fucking vengeance.
Not just Putin but lots of spies and military people - not just men but women - seized power over the Russian Federal.
I expect the Oligarchs have all been for the most part honest, well-intentioned people.
One way to lift oneself from desperate poverty would be, the very instant that ownership of private property became permissible, to buy up what one can, then start a business.
For example Dr. Charles Sims, a Pathologist and the father of my dear friend Murray Sims, when he was just starting out as a doctor, having to pay back all those medical school loads, as well as providing for his wife and five (!) children...
... "Suit up before you play." -- Dear Abby ...
Went in 50-50 with a colleague to buy some large liquid nitrogen dewars (ie. Thermos Bottles), some tanks of liquid nitrogen, and some medical and biological supplies, to start then was quite likely just the two of them spanking the monkey at every opportunity, eventually to become what, when I first met Murray at UC Santa Cruz, was "The Nation's Largest Sperm Bank" and now without a doubt, the world's largest.
Dr. Sims, being from rural Texas, doesn't act like a rich man. I've been to his home in Beverly Hills. I was dumbfounded that it wasn't a whole lot larger than my Mom's condo.
However it was packed solid with original oil paintings. I mean not like hung all over the walls. I mean like leaning gently backwards against every wall of his home, with just a narrow path to walk around in.
Only one painting was hung in a way to facilitate its viewing:
A black leather clad motorcycle cop with his back to the viewer was looking down at a stiff covered with a white sheet.
Just to one side, an elderly detective was questioning a young woman while taking notes on a pad of paper.
There was a plain brick wall in the background. That's it.
That painting was about eight feet square.
I have the idea in my head that I know how how to put Dr. Sim's completely to shame.
Sorry I tend to wander I haven't been getting a lot of sleep lately.
Dr. Sims isn't exactly an Oligarch but he's not far from one.
I myself am still strictly speaking homeless, but not in a practical sense as I'm staying in my elderly mother's tastefully appointed guest room, as I labor over my Get Oligarched Quick Scheme via EarthLink Dialup on her 32-Bit PowerPC iMac.
(I have a Retina Display MacBook Pro but it doesn't have a modem. ;-/ )
It happens that the vast majority of the entire planet's child pornography is both produced in Russia, as well as served by servers on the .ru domain. The servers aren't always physically located in Russia but many are.
Are you familiar with the term "BibCam Boy"? That's the male counterpart to a "Lolita".
I puzzled over what "BiBCam" could possibly refer to, for several years. I'm not dead certain but speculate:
"Boy-in-Boy Camera".
Somewhere out there, I am determined to find it someday then, not so much bust in with guns blazing, rather drop a non-anonymous dime to [email protected], are some shots of ME from when I MYSELF WAS A BIBCAM BOY!
Know you know why I'm so weird. I'm actually quite the happy camper but I tend to get a little pissed at those who defile the temple.
I'm not going to tell you how I found the following rather high-end, high-production value, quite consummately professionally owned, managed and operated Motion Picture Studio which featured right on its Mother Fucking Homepage, the two proud partents of a little toddler.
They concieved their little one when they were both fourteen years old, she gave birth at fifteen, the picture I saw they were both sixteen and right at the top of that homepage was:
WE HAVE OUR OWN ORPHANAGE!
So the offspring of child molestation quite likely is also a star in it's own line of infant sex-fetish flicks.
Most commonly these places earn their coin via referral click payments, however this one was rather more brazen about it.
When I hunted about for some Damning evidence, all I could find was:
YOU MUST JOIN US.
By "JOIN" they meant that all that was required was a one-time paid membership.
How much? Ten thousand dollars? One thousand? One Million?
I don't actually know but I expect they're making billions out of just that one, uh, "Motion Picture Studio".
No.
Just USD $1.00.
Paid by a Credit or Debit Card, with one's card verification code, one's real name, one's real street - NOT! - postal addresa, and one's real phone number.
If I can ever find them again, I'm going to blow like ten fucking grand on a cock-sucking Gift Card at RiteAid, purchase ten thousand memberships all with my real name &c., download ten thousand separate copies of their entire inventory, burn it al to Blu-ray or so, then snail mail a Blu-ray to every journalist in the entire free world.
I expect I'd have to lay low for a little while after that.
I'm down with it. I have the Boy Scout Wilderness Survival Merit Badge.
THIS IS HOW WE ROLL.
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/homeless-like-me/
(There is an Apache configuration error in the character encoding of that page.
I'll fix it Real Soon Now.)
We make make no sense to no one, ourselves no, never will, don't want to. We happiest, friendliest charmingest friends. One does well not to move us to anger.
"I Kazhakh!"
In English: "I am a Kazakhstani!"
But few English speakers have a clue who the Kazakhs are, or where Kazakhstan is located. More commonly: "I am a Cossack!"
For example, twice now the photo-essays of a daring young Ukrainian women, who figured out that, provided she ride at the crests of paved roads, the now-abandoned region around the melted-down, very nearly DETONATED Chernobyl Graphite-Moderated, Water-Cooled Nuclear Reactor, is actually perfectly safe to tool around through on her velocipede.
(Actually a Rocketbike. :-)
Her second Slashdotting resulted from her posting on her site:
"Who are these Slashdot people? They descend on my site like Cossacks!"
While a born and raised American citizen, my direct ancestors being British, Dutch, Scottish and French...
Anyone who knows me at all well, even just by reputation, especially those who know me through my writing - the Pen being Mightier Than the Sword you see -...
Back around the Summer of 1998, while my C++ Mac OS GUI was going along well, my client flatly refused to ask his own staff to QA my deliverables.
With each delivery, I would politely and rationally provide a request that were they to find any bugs of any sort, that I would fix them promptly were they to report them to me. I was so intimately familiar with that product that I didn't really need regresssion, &c.
But no, it was not to be:
"YOUR DELIVERY HAS A BUG IN IT! FIX IT YOUR YOU DON'T GET PAID!"
"Of course. I'll deliver you a fixed binary by end of day tomorrow. So what exactly does my build do..."
CLICK.
So I dropped a dime to a friend I knew from [email protected] I had not previously know that he was a QA engineer at Be, Inc. itself, but I did know he was quite astute.
I offered to pay him to QA my binaries, but he refused to accept payment.
"I'll be there tomorrow morning."
He drove "Over The Hill" from Silicon Valley to my home in Santa Cruz, and walked in the door carrying a first-gen iMac with a bright blue candy-colored case, as well as a coiled-up one hundred foot CAT5 cable.
The very first iMacs were such a huge hit in large part because they all had the very same physical design, but the user had the choice of five distinctly different, quite bright and eye-catching colors of cases.
A year or so after their huge splash in the retail market, The Dark Side Of Steve hit the trade rags:
Apple would not restock your inventory unless you purchased an equal quantity of EACH of the five colors.
My favorite color is a somewhat deep sky blue, as during early morning twilight.
What's yours?
Without a doubt, if we polled five random people, three of them would have the very same favorite color.
Only that first iMac generation had a selection of more than one color.
This because Apple clued in to "Grey Market" iMacs being sold at Fry's Electronics and other shops that were NOT Apple Authorized Dealers.
iMac users were heavily into the Grey Market iMacs as they were so much cheaper than iMacs from Authorized Dealers.
This because their serial numbers were carved off with chisels!
"It wasn't because I was insane and so could not be the father of her children.
It was because of who she regarded as responsible for my insanity: a certain specific person.
I won't tell you who that is, but that same person put one of the UCSC Physics Department's tenured professors into a psychiatrist's office.
The very instant that same professor laid eyes on me my first term, he asked me to speak privately in his office with his door shut, explained that he too experienced chronic depression, then urged me to see a p-doc to get antidepressants.
Many years later, when I was in grad school and that same professor was there on the UCSC Physics faculty, he finally told me that he had been taking antidepressants for the specific reason that that person drove him to suicidal ideation."
32-Bit PowerPC Mac OS X Tiger Macintoshes are still in quite common use. My Mom has a G4 iMac, her sister has a G3 iBook. They are both in mint condition; neither has any reason at all to purchase new hardware.
Imagine my great surprise when early this morning I discovered that "Reset Safari" does NOT delete the cookies for the Safari 3.1.1 that's on Mom's 10.4.11 iMac.
That's a potential online banking and credit card number theft exploit.
The author's thesis was quite intuitively illustrated by the Google AdSense "Heat Map", which depicted a schematic of your typical web page, with a header, navigation bars down both sides, a footer, and some blocks where the content lay.
Heeding the advice of the Heatmap by placing one's Ad Units in the "Hot Spots" on one's old pages quite commonly doubled one's monthly revenue.
However the last time I went to look for it at Google's AdSense support site I could not find it. I don't know whether they moved it or took it down.
For your own purposes, try placing important links at different places on your pages, leave them there for a week - as the traffic to most sites tends to be cyclical with a one-week period - then analyze your web server logs so as to determine how many internal referrals to other pages on your own site resulted from each link.
I analyze my own logs with Analog (http://analog.cx/) which is powerful and configurable but has a steep learning curve. If you don't have the headspace to Read The Fine Manual, there are many fine competitors readily available.
Each subsequent week, move each of those experimental links to a distinctly different place on your pages.
Upon finding the most-effective placement for each link, put all the links in their best places, then try altering their presentation: text color, typeface size and style, backround color and the like.
Once you've found the best combination of everything, you will be in a good position to earn some coin via PPC ads.
I myself for three solid years earned $3,500.00 per month on the average, $5,000.00 for two different months, with just two Ad Units on just one single quite lengthy, well-researched piece on copyright law:
Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads
Among the reasons I work as a coder rather than a Physicist is that coding accomodates my Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder in a way that Academia does not.
Whenever I go back to school I always end up spending a lot of time in nuthouses.
I wrote this particular piece in a locked Psychiatric Inpatient Unit at Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland. While we were not permitted our power cords, the nurses were happy to juice our devices behind the nurse's station.
Stanford Medical Center even has complementary wireless for the patients.
However I was not permitted even my iPhone at Western State Hospital in Lakewood, Washington, not because it was regarded as dangerous, but because the staff did not want to have to pay for replacement of repair if my devices were stolen or damaged. That actually happened once, as they did at one time allow patients to possess computers in the locked wards.
So I continued working on Warp Life, my iOS App, by writing out its source code by hand, on paper with a pencil.
Back in the day, that was the only way one COULD write software, as keypunch machines and their operators were expensive, precious resources.
I have posted about 28 links on my Seattle page, but I have about 120 more in an OpenOffice spreadsheet. However I haven't been getting much sleep at all the least three weeks to I better get some Zs before my eyeballs both start bleeding.
I have a total of 27 separate OOo Calc documents, one for each of the countries I've researched so far. My United States spreadsheet is the most extensive, with a couple dozen states and a couple dozen cities. My Canada spreadsheet has most but not all of the provinces, and most but again not all of the larger cities in the provinces I do have.
I decided the other day to give our friends in Ukraine a leg up, as I know very well that they're heavily into software development, but could only find just one employer, in Kiev. However I have some connections so I will track them all down Real Soon Now.
Please understand that much of my Global Computer Employer Index site consists of mere placeholder pages, so I could work out the overall web design, the directory and document heirarchies, the navigation and the user interface.
I think I've finally got a handle on that, and just now uploaded a new revision, which has quite a lot of work on the navigation, eight or so new countries, many new cities and a few new US states.
I added placeholders for a dozen or so cities in Los Angeles County, as I asked my friend Sari Gennis, a really high-end animator - she was the Art Director for FernGully - to pass my LA County page's link around among her colleagues. I wanted them to see that there really would be something there.
I've had my Santa Cruz County, California page online since 1997, when my former employer Live Picture announced it was moving from scenic, pristine Scotts Valley to San Jose. For most of us LP employees that would mean a treacherous, potentially deadly commute over the Santa Cruz Mountains via Highway 17, so I developed my first software employer research techniques, threw the page up on my site, then quietly passed the link around among my coworkers.
This had the eventual result that some complete stranger emailed to inquire as to my favorite restaurant, then a few days later I received a $100.00 gift certificate, as I had enabled him to find a new coding job!
Actually I would far rather be a Physics PhD, but academia does not accomodate my mental illness of Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder in the way self-employed Software Consulting does:
I regard the Computer Industry as much the same kind of Den of Iniquity as Iesu regarded the Money Changer-Infested Temple.
Really I would rather have nothing to do with computers but I must pay the rent somehow.
All I ever wanted was to create something of real lasting value that I would leave behind after I'm gone.
When I attended the Portland Startup Weekend a couple years ago, some Cute Young Thang pitched an iOS App that would help her make new friends by hooking up with nearby strangers who were running that same App.
I can really see how a sexual predator would really get into that.
Some other guy pitched an App that would help him try out new kinds of beer.
I was at the time easily twice the age of everyone else in attendance, even the Startup Weekend Staff. They were all wearing blue jeans, t-shirts and sneakers, I was wearing a medium grey pinstripe suite, a pale blue polka-dot tie and black leather dress shoes.
I was very tired as I had not slept in days so I was unable to give my full pitch as I had rehearsed it, but more or less:
"Why are you even in this business? What are you going to leave behind for your loved ones when you're gone?"
"Will any of the code you write this weekend still be in use ten thousand years from now?"
I pitched my proposal for an automated free website critique tool, that enable most web designers to fix the most common mistakes, but meant to make some coin through paid, more in-depth critiques as well as web design, website operation and SEO consulting.
I have known very well that I have been in the wrong line of work for over twenty years yet I cannot seem to find my way out.
I may know how to get out of coding now though but it remains to be seen.
That's what I was told was - nine months ago - the going rate for W-2 Senior Software Engineers in Portland and Seattle.
I expect it's a lot more than that in The Valley, and may be a lot more than that now, here in Portland.
However I don't actually require anywhere near $65.00 to be happy.
The borkers wanted me to require $65.00 to accept a gig so THEY would be happy, not I.
All I really require to be happy, is enough cash for WiFi, a single room in a shared house, bus and train tickets about three to four days per week, decent grub and other sundry expenses.
I used to make $120.00 shortly before the Dot-Com crash hit, but that was one of the most horribly depressing experienes of my entire life.
I'd rather make quite a lot less than what I am worth, as I'm rather happy only charging what I actually require for happiness.
All the "borkers" (a derogatory term for "brokers", ie. headhunters, recruiters) tell me I'm worth $65.00 working W-2 through a "Body Shop" (staffing agency), in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area.
I'm presently working remotely, for the most part from Starbucks and Burgerville in Salmon Creek, Washington for quite a lot less than that.
This because I really DO NOT require $65.00 per hour to be happy as a clam.
The borkers all quite suddenly, as well as quite unanimously urged me to increase my rate from $50.00 to $65.00 at the exact same time!
I expect that word got out among them that they were successful in placing similarly-experienced peers of mine for $65.00, which meant that the borkers could obtain ($65.00 - $50.00)/ $50.00 = 30% more commission almost overnight, were it not that I think borkers are the Spawn of Satan.
azakia, a Flash App once requested my permission to turn on my Mac's built-in video camera and microphone.
Funny how I was just then commanded by G-d Almighty Himself to unstall my Flash plugin.
While Flash does require permission to enable video and sound input, I am dead certain that someone with a clue could find a way to do so without actually asking permission.
It's not like those who like to hang at Websites of Ill Repute are diligent about keeping their patches up-to-date.
If you have any additions, comments or corrections please mail them to [email protected]
If you have a LOT of additions, please permit me to send you an OpenOffice spreadsheet that I've already set up.
I will of course put this all into PostgreSQL but I have never designed a database schema in all of my days, so I've been working out the schema design in my spreadsheet.
While I have managed to come up with several ways to automate most of this, I have as yet been doing all the research and HTML markup completely by hand. While pleasant work, it is quite tedious and time consuming.
As a result I haven't been getting a whole lot of sleep lately.
I also have pages with actual payloads for Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, Washington and Santa Cruz, California.
My original research technique is lucidly explained in the Santa Cruz page but does not work at all anymore, as hardly anyone ever puts their street address on their business websites!
Over the weekend or so I'll start coding up a Bot that does most of the heavy lifting for me but even so it won't be foolproof I will have to clean up the data quite a bit by hand.
In the long run I will permit anonymous visitors to suggest new entries with the aid of a Captcha as well as manual moderation.
I contemplated allowing each individual employer to register so they could maintain their own entries but in the end decided against it, in part because I'm not really a web developer, and in part to keep a lid on spam.
tl;dr: Forensic Accounting is the way the Feds busted Al Capone for tax evasion; they never did pin a murder rap on him.
Even if no one is cooking the books a shop like Mt. Gox needs Forensic Accountants anyway, because someone could always have made an honest mistake.
I myself Found Religion the day I decided I'd grown weary of a ten-cent error in my quickbooks. I required eighteen hours to clue in to that it was two separate errors that totalled ten cents, as well as to locate the actual errors.
(Now I use GnuCash. There's a damn good reason for double-entry accounting; GnuCash uses it but Quicken and QuickBooks do not!)
It had what we would now regard as quite primitive, but really was quite a well thought out message board that we just called "The B Forum", as ucscb.ucsc.edu was an "Open Access Computer", free for the asking my anyone who could flash a reasonably decent color photo copy of their cousin's campus ID.
At the time that was regarded as quite forward thinking. UCSC had maybe six vax 11/780, but consider that the MS-DOS 80386 at like 16 MHz was widely advertised as being the equivalent of "One VAX MIP".
"Millions of Instructions Per Second". I once got a guided tour of the MIPS corporate headquarters, where our guide card-keyed us into a test lab. We all puzzled over this six-inch tall heat sink that looked just like Manhattan from a great distance.
"Oh everybody knows we're working on a Ten MIPS product for next year."
So tell me - I'm typing this on my Mom's 32-Bit PowerPC G4 iMac at 1.2 GHz over a 56k dialup modem.
How many GIPS does YOUR Turgid Phallus have? Better overclock your erect member, or your going to come home in the middle of the afternoon one fine day to find your main squeeze doing the dirty with my _TIPS_ smack in the middle of your ceramic tile kitchen floor!
We all chatted via the b forum with 24x80 2400 Baud Glass TTYs. I mean like not even the Televideo TVI910+ I blew half my Summer job savings on so I wouldn't have to hang out at Caltech's oubliette - oh sorry, my mad, I meant to say "computer center" - with all the other acne infested poptartivores.
I mean I down my own acne and all-poptart diet but that didn't imply I wanted to also smell my classmates from the next workstation.
So anyway I dialed in via my $1200.00 2400 Baud Hayes Smartmodem, to learn that we are all going to meet up at midnight at the Lyon's restaurant - rather upscale from Denny's, but not as upscale as Coco's or Shari's for coffee, ice cream and to hang out and chat about how to find all the Magic Mushrooms that grow all over that Damn campus, and have so grown since long before the Dawn of Humanity.
So at like 11:55 or so, suddenly there's no empty spaces in the parking light, so I park my ancient, used, beat up Toyota Corona mid-sized station wagon on the street.
By 12:05 PM there were 100 UCSC students who all wanted to sit together.
They work up their entire staff at home out of their warm, comfortable beds, ordered them in for like two hours of overtime, then rearranged all the tables and chairs into one long, narrow conference table.
I don't clearly recall but I expect I myself ordered one single scoop of ice cream.
Most ordered just one coffee as it had a bottomless carafe - ie. Infinite Free Coffe Refills.
Those who were savvy investors, rather unlike young gentlemen like myself had the wherewithal to order BOTH coffee AND icecream.
I can't recall any of out of our 110 Starving Students ordering anything else, let alone a proper meal.
I know all about what it's like to have to work for a living, so I left maybe a fifty cent tip.
Most of my colleagues were not too poor to tip, nor were they cruel nor satisfied with their service.
No they were to ignorant to know they were expected to tip.
As we started to leave, leaving droplets of melted ice cream and little puddles of spilled coffee all over the place the manager walked right up to ME - what did I do? I'm NOT the perp! I'm a patsy! Lissen Sweet Lady I'm an innocent man ya got the wrong guy and shouted:
DON'T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!
What I'd like to see:
An App that had a GUI as well as crisp responsiveness and well-thought-out usability just like Hacker News, but without an actual webserver.
No, one could connect to other "MyCombinator" members by emailing each other, say, a hash or so, then reading that email in Apple's Mail App.
The hash would look something like:
That would bring up a page that would preselect just the text "a3B7cccd". One copies it to the clipboards, pastes it into MyCombinator, then whoever is responsible for sending that has joins your board and you join theirs just as if you and they were the only two members of MyCombinator.
Now I do fully understand that I just popped a billion dollar product concept, but I'm very tired and the reason I am buck naked as I write this is that my monkey will simply not permit me to sleep unless I spank him first.
CIAO, BELLA!