Month: November 2001

Robyn wrote about Merlin today, and other toys of yesterday. I have a Merlin. Yes, have. Red, just like the one on the site. Like someone else posted there, “Getting my Merlin for Christmas made me officially (if briefly) the coolest kid in the grade … Like someone else mentioned, I also remember covering the speaker with my pillow so my parents wouldn’t hear me playing with it in bed late at night!” I also played with mine so often that my parents bought me rechargeable batteries and the power cord! I thought about my Merlin and my Mr. Professor this summer when I was in North Dakota – I would always sleep in the upstairs bedroom, across the hall from my Grandparents, and I would read, play Merlin, listen to my Barry Manilow 8-tracks… “One Voice, singing in the darkness …” Or I would listen to WLS on the AM radio – out of Chicago, you could pick it up at night even in Sykeston, North Dakota. Yeah, I am serious … why are you laughing at me? *grin* I know, it’s pretty damn funny to think about, but it made me misty-eyed this summer, knowing that those times are gone forever.

What was your first computer? My Mom shelled out way too much money for a Radio Shack Tandy computer, probably when I was in 5th grade or so, for Christmas. I took my first programming classes on Saturdays in 4th grade – 1978-1979. We wrote code to make pictures on the screen, and I plotted out a rainbow. Yep, I was the bomb! Apple IIe computers, someone donated 2 of them to our school. But back to that Tandy, I think it had 4mb of RAM? Maybe 8? My mom *still* won’t confess to what she paid for it! It had a cassette recorder tape drive. Wow. And we used the TV as the monitor. What sucked was that the Commodore 64 came out that year too, and I really wished she would have gotten one of those instead – it would have been a lot more “bang for the buck”!

By the way, I have 2 old 486s sitting here, with enough power to run Win3.1 but not a lot more. Not a lot of RAM or a very big hard drive. One of them may actually have Win95 on it, not sure. Anyways, is there anything I can use them for besides bookends? They are gathering dust and I have no idea what to do with them! I guess I should look over at e-Bay and see if I should bother selling them there. Hmmm… Suggestions anyone?

As Mike has so kindly pointed out, fine and whatever are the two most whine-killing words in the English language. That is why I use them so often! (Although, you know … now that the IO isn’t around, I don’t have to use them as much!) When Chelsey & I use them on IM, we even emphasise the tone that most women use when they say those words:

*TONE* Fine, WHATEVER */TONE*

Chelsey totally doesn’t get HTML, but she has at least learned enough to know that the tone marks denote the beginning and the end of the command. What better way is there to teach someone the basic fundamentals of HTML!

If you know a tidy public loo somewhere, please submit it to TheBathroomDiaries.com.

Naomi & I both use Trillian to access AIM, ICQ, MSN & Yahoo at the same time (1 interface, all IMs) So one night we were talking and it was pretty late and … this is how to tell that it’s been a long night. Meant to share that a long time ago, because it was pretty darn funny!

Chelsey was able to get great tickets to see the Cirque du Soleil show, Dralion, when it comes to Houston in January – and she invited me to go! She has a child’s ticket too that I could use to take Jason, but it’s a week night at 9pm … and I can’t decide. But it’s one of those “once in a lifetime” sort of things, right? I should probably take him too, and he is old enough now that I think he would really enjoy it. I just wish it wasn’t so late at night. Maybe I’ll make a special weekend out of it and just take the next day off and that way we can sleep in on Friday!