What a trip it has been studying a low-level programming language, after a brief 10 year stint writing fiction and poetry - LOL. The tutorial I'm taking is talking about bitwise operators, shifting bits, and so forth. Making me flash back to the time in the late 1970s when I bought a kit, and built (or soldered) a flip-flop circuit. Can't remember it the thing actually worked - it was supposed to be a portion of a binary adder or register. It was educational - must have been, if I still remember it today. In any case, nowadays we have multi-CPU PCs and etc - will be interesting to learn how programming languages deal with all of that.
Even though I'm studying C,
it would be nice to occasionally be
simply reading poetry under a tree;
Many ways to set a mind free.
Have a good day today, wherever you happen to be.
Monday, March 27, 2017
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
posting stuff then and now
Early 90s – turn on PeeCee. Open the
Windows Terminal from Accessories, and type in a phone number to
connect. Once you dial in through an 800 number, you see a text
main menu.
Select menu choice to access the
Internet. Browse text windows. Find a Usenet server, download
newsgroups, subscribe to one. Then, write out your post. Takes
about an hour or so.
Oh - you want to send an email? Maybe you can get Eudora and run it standalone, or perhaps use Pine on a unix server. The are as arcane as they sound, back then! You can always dial BBS's from your Terminal window, and figure out their interfaces - all text based.
Mid 90's. Turn on PC. Fire up
client program or terminal, and connect to a BBS. In some cases,
connect to the Internet. More downloading and subscribing before you
can post. Chat programs exist, and you can type back and forth text
messages. MIRC appears (a successor to regular IRC), and there are
many more boards to chat on. Netscape dominates the WWW with its
rich graphical interface, until Microsoft muscles in.
Mid to late 90's. America Online and
its advanced (for the time) Graphical User Interface. Join groups,
and message back and forth in group windows, etc. Now you can post
and chat with great ease.
Late 90's to 2000's: Internet access
through a variety of means, including AOL, Compuserve, Earthlink,
AT&T, etc. The Web Browser totally supplants text messaging and
BBS's. Free services pop up, competition heats up among ISPs.
Cable modems and DSL come on to the scene. It becomes easier than
ever to chat with someone.
Late 2000's: Facebook comes into
existence. Now anyone can post pictures of pets, their bodies, cars,
whatever they like, and talk about them, and share with others or the
world. The Iphone debuts.
Now: I can post this on FB (via my handheld smartphone) and show
it to the world. A far cry from text-based Telnet or IRC, running on
those rickety old 386 and 486-based desktop machines. My, how far we have
come in such a short time.
BTW, have you seen what my cat looks
like? LoL.
Sunday, March 12, 2017
Spring forward With Some New Reading
Enjoy All!
Future Property – Michael Wilson
Experimental Tales – Dycen Alexander
The Osmotics – Dycen Alexander
https://www.amazon.com/Osmotics-Dycen-Alexander/dp/1495486575
New Venture – Dycen Alexander
Epic Prime Collection – Dycen Alexander
Crime Spree – poetry - Mike Wilson
A Strange Enterprise collection of speculations
Shadow Intersection - poetry
-end
Saturday, March 11, 2017
Twenty-Teens
Freedom has gone back in the closet,
bare skin hidden under strict doctrine.
Modesty ushers in chastity,
boldness replaced by rigidity.
Shorts replaced by baggy pants in
basketball,
swim trunks change into swim suits.
No untoward exposure allowed in our
neo-victorian society, so changed over
the decades from the freewheeling
1960's.
That party ended long ago, of course.
But social mores and attitudes still
ossify,
leading one to wonder aloud:
“What will be the breaking point?”
“When can youth once again break
free?”
The time is here for another social
revolution.
Will anyone be able to pull themselves
away,
or electronic devices hold complete
sway.
Cannot promulgate any youthful
rebellion
when your mind is tethered to
civilization.
Someday someone will escape the
electronic cage,
go out into the streets, shuck all
inhibitions, and rage!
Thursday, March 09, 2017
Silicon-telligence
The earliest days of computing were
comprised of electromechanical
counters;
punch cards, adding machines, sorters
and tabulators populated many
backrooms.
Those who could run such things were
considered whizzes, invaluable to the
business.
From accountants scratching balances
out to
automatic, universal computing machines
was
around 100 years total.
Punched card data processing
transformed
accounting and record-keeping in a few
decades.
The mainframe systems that followed
changed things still further, paving
the way for
remote transactions of all kinds.
ATM's
followed, and anywhere banking soon arrived.
Today the many marvels we all enjoy
derive from those early pioneers'
efforts.
Atanasoff, Mauchly, Eckerd, and Turing;
Many more names could be added here.
Each gave their contribution to the
whole
of automated computing knowledge.
When someday AI entities look back,
perhaps they will worship these folks
as their creators, progenitors,
founders all.
Machine entities might fill silicon
cathedrals,
keening the praises of their flesh
forbears...
Perhaps their choirs will sound like
the squeal
of an old-fashioned modem handshake?
All Praise Semiconductors Be,
No Longer Carbon-based Life are We!
010101011001111000011101111100000111110000000011111000
Monday, March 06, 2017
Finally - something
My creative wellspring seems to
have run dry lately for blog posts. But my excuse is that I am
channeling all of my efforts towards national poetry contests, trying
to come up with material to enter them. The political scene lately
has made my blood boil. Do not like to see workers rights trampled,
safeguards and benefits taken away, etc, etc. No need to rehash it
all here, but the actions going on in the Iowa statehouse, as well as
the US congress are disheartening to say the least. I'm just trying
to put my head down and keep going, every day. It's all most of us
can do, being powerless to affect the outcome.
At least I saw something
interesting on the Internet. Researchers have made a new discovery
regarding the brain, the existence of a few very long neurons that
connect many separate parts of the brain. When these are
artificially stimulated in a test subject, they basically lose
consciousness – it just switches off. When the stimulation stops,
they regain consciousness, not remembering what happened.
At least some science marches on.
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