I lost all of my hard disk data due to a power surge in December. On Wednesday the data recovery man who had supposedly been working on my disks for over 3 months informed me that he had given up. He has returned the disks and now I am back to square one. Mostly. I have from time-to-time made backups of my data and so have recovered all of my documents pre-July 1998 and ~1500 of my photos from 2001-2003. As I restore data I have been going down memory lane and looking at some of my past work. Here is a gem, my fantasy computer wish list from 27 January 1996:
| Description |
Price |
Tax |
Price |
Essential |
| Pentium 133 |
1645 |
22 |
2007 |
* |
| 1080Mb IDE HDD |
315 |
22 |
384 |
* |
| 1080Mb IDE HDD |
315 |
22 |
384 |
|
| 32Mb RAM |
1020 |
22 |
1244 |
* |
| 64-bit VGA card w/MPEG |
39 |
22 |
47 |
* |
| Upgrade to 2Mb Video |
60 |
22 |
73 |
* |
| Philips 17” MM Monitor 1280×1024 |
1200 |
22 |
1464 |
* |
| Sound Card, 4xCD-ROM, 18 CDs |
315 |
13.2 |
357 |
* |
| Upgrade Sound Card to 32bit PnP |
70 |
11 |
77 |
* |
| MS Office Pro 4.3 CD-ROM (OEM) |
65 |
0 |
65 |
* |
| Adobe Photoshop 3.0 NFR CD |
172 |
0 |
172 |
* |
| Adobe PageMaker 5.0 NFR CD |
161 |
0 |
161 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
5377 |
|
6435 |
5890 |
Check out that price!!
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I am slowly moving towards .text, eventually I will extend it to the point that it replaces the white.darryn.net interface and moves from blog.darryn.net to www.darryn.net. I have exported all my blog data to the .text format, and I am currently working on an app to export all the photo data. After that I will write the necessary stuff to add to .text the features that I want. Which creates a problem.
I want to add features to .text to satisfy my requirements. I need to make changes to the database. I am not a Real Programmer, I am an infrastructure/networking type of guy. I cannot contribute code to the .text project, because my code is shit, it does the job in the right conditions but real programmers would die of fear if they saw my actual code. If I don’t contribute code I risk breaking my extensions every time a new release of .text comes around. I will email Scott and ask him what he suggests.
Related is that there is no winforms photo management tool for the .text photo albums AFAIK. Photon is a great tool for the darryn.net engine, but only two sites use it and I am moving both of those to .text. So I need to write Photon v3 to work with .text photo albums. There is definitely a market for this as there are thousands of .text blogs out there. There are two problems. .Text does not have the web services to support Photon, and I am not a Real Programmer (IANAP). I can write a Photon 3 that will work for those of us who have direct access to the SQL server, but I imagine that most will not, and I am over my head when it comes to helping them.
Comments?
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Written on 23 March 2004
by darryn under
Uncategorized
with
Tagged with tech
Henk and Bea, the in-laws, returned to The Netherlands* this afternoon, after a 2 week visit. We had a great time, somehow relaxing yet doing something every day. There were only three days that I didn’t swim somewhere, usually at a beach. We ate a lot. I learned a bit more Dutch, and got used to the sounds a bit more as they spoke a lot of Dutch, only some of which I recognised, e.g. Blah blah blah blah eighty blah blah morning blah blah Darryn blah blah he blah refrigerator. Whenever they spoke in Dutch, I knew that they were talking about me. I didn’t mind, since it must have been complimentary. It was about me, after all 
I was surprised to find that I was a bit sad to see them go. I will see them soon, I have set March 15th 2005 as the day that I will move to Holland. I have written about this before but there is still some to add. It is both scary and liberating. Scary because I am leaving the comfort zone, liberating because I am starting again. This decision has also had another new side-effect - I have started thinking less short-term, although this is possibly just because of aging. I know what I am doing in a year, I know what I intend to do in two years (work for a Large Software Company). I even have plans for further into the future, and I am not even in a Big Plans phase at the moment.
* I wrote Nederland originally, but changed it because it seemed wanky. But in the last few weeks I have found that some words I think of in Dutch instead of Engels, even English words. An example would be referring to the koelkast instead of the fridge. A lot of things were lekker. They say that when you think in another language that you have crossed a line, and I guess that has happened to me. I still have very few clues when listening to real Dutch though, and even less when speaking. I also discovered that I remember a lot more French than I would have thought. Bea is more comfortable in French than English and often switches mid-sentence, and usually I am able to understand anyway. I still have a long way to go before I am conversing with Pierre in Gay Paree or Pieter in Amsterdam.
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I am on leave from work, for a bit over 2 weeks, as of last Tuesday. It is a year since I last took leave of any significant duration, and it also a year since Kirsten’s parents were last here from the Netherlands. They liked it so much that they have returned, and I am taking corresponding time off to spend with them.
In the culture that I have been exposed to (i.e. the media) the in-laws are an evil force, to be tolerated at best. This is not my experience. I like them both and have fun when I am with them. Is something wrong? We enjoy our holidays together, and I am looking forward to seeing their part of the world when I move to the Netherlands in one year and 3 days.
They do not read my blog, probably are not aware of it. So this is not sucking up, it is real.
Darryn.net: keeping it real since 1999
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this thread, start at the bottom. You will immediately pull out your credit card and go to amazon. Unless you are stronger than I.
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After 30 hours, the bleeding has mostly stopped. The bleeding, of course, coming from the big hole in my mouth where my wisdom tooth used to be. This tooth had gone rogue and had to be eliminated as an example to the others. It didn’t go without a fight. It adopted a ’scorched earth’ policy and left a hole that required three stitches to close, and still bled for more than a day.
Now it just hurts.
I was not nervous going into the dentists’ as I had not been thinking about the extraction. The dentist came to the waiting room before I even sat down and within a minute I was in the chair. She frowned a bit as she looked at the x-ray, “this one might be difficult“. The chair was tilted back. I knew what was coming up. The Needle. I have heard from many people that the injection of the anaesthetic is the worst part of dental surgery, and that is partly true. The injection is the worst part of the surgery. The worst part of the surgery experience is when the anaesthetic wears off. The needle was unpleasant, but I wouldn’t say that it hurt. It was just a bit worse than a blood test.
Once I was suitably numb the extraction commenced. It is all grunt work, using an array of different types of pliers (she called them forceps, but I knew what they really were). After over thirty minutes of wrenching, including a short break, the dentist stood back with a satisfied smile and a tooth in her pliers. Because I was totally numb, I had no idea that she had been successful until I saw the tooth, and then only briefly. She quickly took the tooth away to show off to her other dentist mates. Either my tooth was particularly exciting, or they do this for every patient so that they feel special. My gnarled tooth doesn’t look like the smiling teeth on toothpaste tubes, so perhaps it was the former.
After showing off my tooth, the dentist returned to find that I was bleeding a little too much for her liking, so she stitched the wound closed. That didn’t help, so she stitched it again. And again. The bleeding slowed a bit and she was satisfied, but as I said before the bleeding didn’t stop for over 30 hours. An interesting observation: They don’t get some thread and a needle, and put the thread through the needle. The needle and the thread come pre-threaded, in little individual serve sterile packs.
Anyway, here is the tooth. I wish I had an SLR, this photo took far too much effort to create.
Pretty, isn’t it?
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