Back in the dark ages of the interwebs, long before the days of banner ads and animated .gifs, when the fashionable background color of all websites was gray, and when knowing HTML meant you knew how to change the text size and alignment, I started my very first web page … on GeoCities … because at the time, it was the only place I knew of where you could get a free webpage, and because you could have a cool “address” like www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4780 (and for those of you Wayback Machine users, my page was WAY before the one that’s archived) and you could decorate your page with nifty stuff like rainbow divider bars and stuff. It was also the reason I learned HTML in the first place, and to this day I still hand code most of my sites using good old archaic HTML – no Flash, no .css, no .php just HTML. Of course, this blog is special because I use the magic of WordPress but that’s only because it’s easy, and I’m lazy.

GeoCities was also the very first home of the nomadic First Bernadette Peters Webpage. It didn’t stay there long though, it moved first to CompuServe then to Earthlink then I closed it back in 1999 because I was bored and there were other fan pages by then and Bernadette finally got her own “official” web page.

runs on my cheapass laptop but not on my desktop, how pathetic is that? Anyone wanna buy me a new desktop for my birthday? Heheee. I wonder if Sims 3 will run on it too ….

wow, 35 Windows updates. I think it’s taking a bit longer to download cuz I’m on wireless which is slower and less reliable than a wired hookup. Oh, and McAfee insisted on updating RIGHT NOW too grrrr. Anyway, still haven’t installed Firefox and I knew it already but man, Internet Exploder sucks eggs. What were they thinking? SLOW and U G L Y. And you can’t uninstall it either cuz it’s hooked into the system, and even my beloved Firefox uses IE’s security settings now waaaaah.

I like the little laptop so far though, it’s a wee bit slow, but I think that might mostly just be the downloading in the background thing. Once McAfee finished its thing it seemed a bit faster. I might be able to tweak things a bit to speed it up though, and I gotta get rid of that blasted Windows Messenger too grrrr. I wonder if I could reformat and make this a Linux box? Heheee. Oh wait, WOW doesn’t run on Linux, never mind. And oh yeah, there’s no CD drive.

One other thing I don’t like is the keyboard layout is a bit different than my normal keyboard so it makes rapid switching between the two kinda wacky. Oh, and the fact I keep trying to type on my regular keyboard instead of the laptop hehe. That’ll be done after I’m done updating the laptop though, I’m just multi-tasking ‘em both at the moment. I had to attach a mouse too, the little touchpad thing was just too annoying to use right now, I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but navigating menus with it was just more than I could take after working all day.

Overall though it’s a cute little machine, tiny and portable, but the screen is quite useable, bigger than it looked at Walmart, just right for web browsing although for some pages it does “cut off” the bottom of the page so you gotta scroll a bit (ie Travians) but it’s perfectly acceptable. It really makes my desktop look hideously pathetic though. Oh well, I’ll likely be working more overtime again the next few weeks cuz people are on vacation again, so maybe by summer’s end I’ll be able to buy a real desktop yay!

I succumbed to the Sam’s Club price spell o’doom and decided to go ahead and buy that cheapass laptop computer. They had ‘em on display at Walmart, couldn’t try it out but I got to see it and it’s quite cute. I decided to get the one with the solid state drive rather than pay an extra $80 for a built-in hard drive since you can buy external hard drives for about the same price and they’re portable (ie I could use it on my real computer too.) I don’t really need that though I don’t think, I just want a little laptop I can surf the internet with and do stuff like email and word processing and stuff like that. If I do decide to get an external drive though I could even do something nutty like play World of Warcraft on it. The truly sad thing though is this $200 laptop has specs about the same as my current desktop PC (except my desktop actually has a CD drive and hard drive hehe, but the DVD drive on it is jammed up so I can’t actually remove the Sims 2 DVD that’s stuck in there.) Oh and my desktop has a slightly bigger screen.

Anyway, this will give me a nice little birthday present to play with for a few months and by then I should have enough money saved up to buy a decent desktop so I don’t have to settle for that $400 cheapo they had at Sam’s Club. And my Sam’s Club membership is good through September 13th, so that’s good cuz computers usually get cheap around “back to school” time. And who knows, if I work a lotta overtime maybe I can afford one of these puppies. Yeah, I wish.

I upgraded my WordPress today, only this time instead of doing it the old fashioned, manual upgrade way, I did it via an “automatic upgrade” plugin and it seemed very quick and easy … until it asked me to log in after upgrading and it wouldn’t. Great. LOL. And of course it doesn’t have a “revert” option (not that it would matter since I couldn’t log in anyway.) I didn’t bother to read how the heck I’m supposed to revert back to a previous backup (thank goodness it made one.) So my only hope was reading posts from other users and fortunately someone had the same problem and said it was a browser issue, and to use (ick) Internet Explorer. So I fire up Ickynet Exploder and WTH? It works. I try again with Firefox and nothin’. Great. Does this mean I’m gonna have to use IE every time I post a new blog entry? That means less posts! On a whim, I decided to restart Firefox to see if just maybe that would work, and guess what! It does! Woohoo! Anyway, everything seems to be working OK now. I’m not quite sure I trust this upgrade plugin though, but it sure does make things way easier, cuz the old upgrade way I had to re-read instructions on how to do it cuz it’s just complicated enough that trying to do it by memory would mean I’d probably screw it up.

A friend of mine and I were discussing old software, the kind that ran on floppy disks. Yeah uhm … those things they don’t even make any more. Anyway, we were talkin’ about all the great old software we had and how the old DOS stuff doesn’t run on Windows Vista (yet another reason not to upgrade to Vista.) Now, I don’t really use any of my old floppy software right now, but I have fond memories of one particular program called OzWin that saved my ass years ago when I first got onto that magical “information superhighway” back in the early 90′s. This was back in the days when CompuServe used to charge almost five bucks an hour for internet access (unless you were smart and had multiple accounts.) I remember with glee the day CompuServe slashed their prices to compete with AOL to a measly $2.95/hr woot!

Anyway, this OzWin program was great, it allowed people like me who read a lotta forum posts on CompuServe to set it up to very quickly (this was in the days when a 9600 baud modem was screaming fast) pull all the relevant posts from your favorite forums in seconds and then it would disconnect and you could read at your leisure, and compose replies offline, then the next time it connected it’d plaster all your replies up in seconds and make you look like a really, really fast typer. That was one of only a handful of pieces of software that I felt was worth the cost of it (and it was shareware and cost like $20 or something, with free upgrades for life.) I keep my old OzWin floppies for nostalgia’s sake even though CompuServe is long gone now. But I’m really, really thankful the interwebs went “all you can eat” in the mid-90′s, otherwise I woulda gone broke and wouldn’t be here right now typing away tainting the internet with my blather.

I heard about this list on the radio today, it’s kind of old news though. I can proudly say though, that I have personally owned two of the top 10, and my dad owned an Apple III. Three outta ten! Woohoo! I disagree though, on their choice of the Commodore VIC-20, because that, for me, was the bestest computer ever, it was my very first, and it is the reason I am the computer geek I am today. I became a gamer on that computer, I learned how to program (in BASIC) on that computer, I even learned to hack on that computer. And my typing skills vastly improved too! So there! I’ll agree on the other one I owned though, the Packard Bell, I bought it because it was dirt-ass cheap, and well, you get what you pay for. I think I still have it stuffed away somewhere too, I’m not sure. I mighta trashed it I forget. The only good thing about that computer, is it’s the one I first got on the internet with (using a WinModem that I had to write my own strings for to get the damn thing to connect.) My friends used to tease me about my Packard Smell computer. Ah, the good old days.

I did something today I shoulda done years ago, I cracked open my computer case and went dust bunny hunting and what a success it was! I’d been noticing my computer was running a wee bit hot the last few uhm … years and that baby dust bunnies would escape when I’d (try to) open up the DVD drive, so I finally remembered I needed to clean before I’d turned on the computer. I swear there was about 1/2″ of dust on the bottom floor of the computer, as well as quite a few nests nuzzled up among the cables and in the fans and whatnot. Dust bunnies everywhere! The good news is, my computer only has one RAM chip (it has 512 megs and I figured that meant 2×256) so upgrading to 1 gig will be quite a bit cheaper than I’d anticipated. If I decid to upgrade. I had seriously considered doing so before when I was beta testing LOTRO last year … until I realized how much LOTRO sucked. I also kinda figure the computer is so old (about 4 years, yeah, go ahead, laugh,) it’s not really worth doing upgrades. It’s odd though, every computer I’ve ever owned before this one, I’ve upgraded at least once at some point. And this was a dirt cheap bottom-o-the-barrel one to begin with, just like all my others. But I guess even the dirt cheap ones have been adequate for a few years now. It would be nice if it had more RAM though; if I can find a RAM chip for $30 or so I might get it, but the kinda RAM the box uses is pretty much obsolete now so I mighta missed my opportunity. Oh well. It’s quite a nice configuration though, everything is easy access, especially the hard drives, which have thumb screws in the slot and pull straight out, not sideways crammed in with wires and other junk like every other computer I’ve ever had. Sweet! Too bad I didn’t know that and that I don’t really need another drive. It also has 2 spare PCI slots (old kind) and one AGP slot if I wanna upgrade my sad onboard video. And it has a second cooling fan too! But the best news is it’s running nice and cool now, not blowing hot air out by my feet. That’ll be nice for summer! And maybe I won’t have to stick that external mini-fan on top of the case to suck out the hot air and keep it from overheating like I’ve been doing the last couple years on hot days.