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New Stuff

NEW STUFF

I have often wondered where I was, technologically speaking, at some point in my life. For example, when did Wayne Shimoguchi first explain about how to use a URL or when he led me towards Google? Two lifechanging events I can thank Wayne for being the one to point me the way. Was it 93 or 94 for my first URL? I can't believe with as much computing that I actually did at Penn before coming to Japan, I didn't ever use a browser, but very few people had at that point. From now on I will keep track of new stuff like this.

Sept. 4, 1973. My first computer class begins. In this class, we spent most of our time waiting in line to an IBM mainframe with stacks of cards. You'd get an error message on a big light-green and white striped sheet of paper and have to figure out how to fix the error, type a new card or two and wait in line again. We programmed in FORTRAN and my final project was a computer program that allowed you to interactively transpose music. You'd put a song in (written as a series of notes on cards) and then a sheet of paper would pop out instructing you to push control buttons to determine how many half-steps you wanted to transpose the music to. The computer would then print out the new notes in the transposed key. Although the final project was interesting, my proudest achievement for which I recieved no credit was creating a punched card that played the famous drum fill to the song "Wipe Out" as it was copied to another card. Somewhere in my stuff at my parents' house, some of these cards still exist.

The disks were huge multiplate disks that weighed a couple of pounds were about 18 inches in diameter and about 12 inches high if my memory serves me right and I'm guessing probably were only dozens of megabytes at the most. Those were brave new days. (related trivia: this is exatly one week before one of the several famous september 11th when the U.S. backed Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected Allende in Chile.)

Jan. 19, 2007 In a meeting, Steve Cornwell used his phone to google a movie trivia question that came up in a discussion. I've googled on my wireless laptop in discussions at parties in my house, but this was the first time to see someone do it with a phone.

Jan. 11, 2007 I installed an RSS feed reader called "Pulp Fiction". I had installed one maybe a year ago but never really used it. Jerrod Hansen got me started way back but I'm still an agnostic on this technology. I keep thinking this is what I need to do, but still find it hard to get away from clicking my way through my browser. I think it could make my life more efficient, but I've got to get in the habit of using it. I was thinking you could put RSS feeds on a web page

Jan. 5, 2007. I installed hyperwords into my firefox browser. It seemed like a good thing even though I am not sure what all the hype is about.

Sept. 12, 2007. I am now dubbing hi8 analog video tapes to my iMovie software using a Sony Camera as a A/D converter.

Dec. 17, 2008. Thinking about an iPhone, though it has been probably a year since I saw the first one. Not sure I like the touchscreen... but will consider it for various reasons. My current softbank phone is tied to Yahoo Japan. This is really annoying since only Japanese is available through this.