The Liberal Avenger: A Geek Walks down Memory Lane

A Massachusetts born and bred, Berkeley-educated, honorary Southeast Asian liberal coming to you from beautiful blue New England...

Best of LiberalAvenger.com:

The sordid tale of Michelle Malkin and her puppeteer husband Jesse - two voices, acting as one, wrapped up in a pretty package. Easy-to-digest racism for the masses.

avenger@liberalavenger.com
Writers

"At times, conservatives have even trod into arguing in favor of a war ethos (see, for instance the popular bumper sticker: "War Has Never Solved Anything, Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism and Communism"); at other times -- as in all the talk about "shock and awe" in the Iraq invasion -- they have even suggested there is a kind of beauty to violence, especially in the service of the imposition of American will. "

"Let's do the sign of the cross. It'll make us feel real boss."

- Skafish

"Look, can we all at least agree on one thing -- if the 'I didn't do it' administration is re-coronated, that come November 3, EVERYTHING IS THEIR FUCKING FAULT."

"Arbolist... Look up the word. I don't now, maybe I made it up. Anyway, it's an arbo-tree-ist, somebody who knows about trees."

- George W. Bush, USA Today, 08/21/2001

"There are no mirrors in Bush's church."

- Tim Appelo, Seattle Weekly, 12/08/2004

"Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try to understand each other, we may even become friends."

- Maya Angelou

"To those who consider the war a mistake but still fear the consequences of military withdrawal, we ask these questions: when will enough be enough? If not now, when?"

- An Appeal to Global Conscience (via j a c k *)

"How much productivity has been wasted, not reducing our dependence on oil, but to entice us to buy more that is made with, and which consumes for its continuance - oil. It would be as if a man who had been poisoned, rather than reaching for the emetic, reaches for another dose of the poison."

- Stirling Newberry, So We Want a Revolution, 03/18/2005


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Tuesday, April 26, 2005

A Geek Walks down Memory Lane

Ryan and I were talking about "the good old days" in email and I sent him this. I thought that some of you might get a kick out of it:

I've been a computer geek since I was in 5th grade - around 1979. There was a young psychologist at my school who got a grant to buy two of the original Apple computers (pre-Macintosh) and teach BASIC to a handful of the kids who did the best in math. I was hooked! My early computer days memories are filled with green and amber screens, 110 baud modems, handset-coupled modems, terminal interaction on a line printer instead of a monitor, $300 1meg SIMMS (1989), a 10 Megabyte Hard Drive the size of a toaster oven, "blue boxing" and phreaking, CompuServe, the Sinclair personal computer, the Coleco ADAM, the Commodore PET (with a wooden case), VIC-20 and 64. I even had an IBM PCjr back in 1983!

Does anyone else remember the pre-web days when the magic of the internet largely consisted of ftping into college students' personal directories and rummaging around, looking for files about geeky things like Plot Holes in Bladerunner and Simpsons Quotes by Episode? How about the thrill of telnet'ing into a server in Finland to run some stupid shell program? "I can't believe it! I'm actually operating a computer in Finland!"

Those were the days, huh?

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