Tangential: Does anyone know how to generate HTML docs such as this? It looks like a page in a book - with a header/footer and page number. And, surprisingly no one in 1991 imaged we would be reading it on a 4k widescreen - and here I am, and it is extremely readable (using SF Mono on macOS). I would love to know what tools can be used to generate almost paper-like HTML docs.
During my junior year of high school, there was a girl in my calculus class that I wanted to ask out to our homecoming. Time was running short and I had no idea how I would ask her.
Then, while sitting in class, inspiration struck.
I started coding frantically on my TI-84. When the school day ended, I spent several hours in my room refining my program.
The next day, at the end of calculus, I asked this girl if I could see her calculator. (I was well known for creating games and other useful programs on TI's, so this wasn't that far out.) She handed me her calculator. I transferred the program I had written, set it up, and handed it to her. "Press ENTER", I said, and then scurried out the door.
The program apologized for the strange manner of my asking her out to a dance, then presented a menu saying "will you come to homecoming with me?" If she pressed "No", it would go to a new menu that begged, "please?" If she pressed "yes," it would confirm one more time with a cheerful "really?" Finally, if all was successful it would thank her for agreeing to come with me.
The next day, at the beginning of class, she walked up to where I was sitting, put her calculator down on my desk, and said "Press ENTER".
She had rewritten the program so that it would a.) tell me that she would come with me, and b.) didn't walk through the same series of menus. She wasn't a programmer by any means, but had managed to figure it out.
Nothing came from that other than just a good friendship. She married one of my friends, and I married a girl I met that summer. The four of us have hung out once or twice to play games, all just as good friends.
The power is out on your boat, again. It’s 3am. You suspect that, again, the alternator housing has come loose.
You duct tape a flashlight to the bulkhead so you can work hands free and actually see what you are doing. All you have on you is a broken pocket knife but it’ll do because all you need to accomplish right now is to tighten the housing screws enough. You know this for a fact because you’ve done it three times already in the last 24 hours.
It’s not even a documented procedure — you’ll replace the housing mounts entirely when you’re back at port in three days’ time. You guarantee it — this is the first thing you’ll do even, when you get back to shore. You have my word on that, captain!
The duct tape came unstuck. It was damp and doesn’t work so well (at all) when it’s wet. The flashlight survived the fall. More tape this time should do the job. Tape mount version 2 will still unstick of course, eventually. Nothing stops the damp at sea, but if you use enough tape then you’ll have fixed the power by the time the tape fails. That’s your plan B and you’re sticking to it.
Sure, you could do this job better if you had an impact driver with an automatically illuminated bit chuck, but buying one of those is further down the todo list than fixing the power on the boat, making it back to port, and ensuring the power doesn’t fail this way again, as promised. Or at least won’t fail for the next few shifts.
On your days off you relax by programming in Bash.
Maybe if you dial the “punk” down to zero, dial the “dystopia” up to 9, and maybe “cyber” is around 3 or 4 depending on how futuristic modern day China is.
I enjoyed learning how they added a rotating ball to that typewriter and hooked it up to some kind of mainframe for the first APL implementation I think.
But it's more than the romance of the ink that is missed. One has lost the visual impact of all discards with the use of the virtual trashcan. The psychology of seeing or the stark visual impact of a trashcan filled to the brim with all the imperfect and therefore discarded attempts of one's creative effort is lost - almost forever. These were the metrics of effort now untenable in the virtual trashcan. Gone. Who knows how one's next attempt would have shaped out or re-imagined had one seen even a few of the uncountable crumpled up balls of paper strewn across the room? Maybe a signal to give up? Maybe a sign to believe that one hasn't reached even half way to acceptable quality?
The mess is still there but only now one keeps the detritus of all of one's creative efforts, all the previous discarded attempts, silently gunked up in the recesses of the forgetful mind.
One would argue that version control might be sufficient to trace the evolution of ideas. But no. One would still miss the violence of the mind changes, of reckless scribbles or of reattempts that often take place in between the commits. Things are forever lost in the virtual trashcan and it's blunt implement, the backspace.
I recently went through (the recordings of) MIT’s intro course for electrical engineers, in which somewhere the professor says students may wonder why they have to do all this calculus and learn FET models and so on — in real life don’t you just wire chips together? And he points out that MIT degrees are for the people who make the chips.
A few others: https://soundcloud.com/stupidamericanpig/the-first-balorian-...
https://soundcloud.com/stupidamericanpig/lofi-a-l-orange
https://soundcloud.com/stupidamericanpig/sentient-beings
Here is a demo I did for the GForce Mtron Optitron expansion https://soundcloud.com/stupidamericanpig/march-of-the-caffin...