Birthday Ruminations

Greetings to all who read this!

Well, I’m 42 today, how about that?  Join with me in the resounding chorus (with respects to Mildred and Patty Hill):

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday dear Timothy….
Happy birthday to you!

Now, click over to www.Paypal.com and send money to tblaisdell@avstgroup.com!  Do it now!  They take credit cards!

So what am I thinking about on my birthday?  Well, I’m 42.  What kind of an age is 42?  When I was in my 30’s I felt like I was still young.  Then turning 40 was kind of a milestone.  Then 41 felt like something because it was my first birthday after turning 40.  Now I’m 42.  What’s that?  It just feels old.  

You know what’s amazing to me?  Last night my wife and I and my son Jesse played Settlers of Catan together at http://games.asobrain.com with a guy from Germany.  Jesse’s in his room, Molly’s in our bedroom, and I’m in the living room, the other guy’s in Germany and the computer on which we’re all playing is sitting in Belgium.  That just boggles my mind.

When I first got started with computers, I was writing dBase and Turbo Pascal code on a CP/M server.  We had to keep the server at a constant 60 degrees, so I had to keep a jacket and gloves in my office and wear them all the time.  I sat shivering in my office day by day, thinking I was really on the edge!  In my college classes we had to submit complicated JPL commands to the IBM servers just to get our C code to compile, but at my office, with Turbo Pascal I could just hit ‘R’ and my code would compile and run in a jiffy!  And 64K of memory to play with!

Then I remember the first time I heard about the “Internet”.  I was in the Zachry building at Texas A&M, in a state-of-the-art computer lab called the “Crystal Palace”.  At that time, the Crystal Palace was the only place (that I knew of) on campus with access to the Internet, and my very first introduction to it was to learn that a fellow student was going to have an “Internet date”.  This, I was told, was where a student at one university would converse with a student at another university in real time over a network which connected all universities called the Internet.  Talk about cutting edge!  

Then I remember when people started to talk about computer “viruses”.  They were pretty few and far between in those days, but quite destructive.  Writing a program that would, say, format the hard drive or clear the boot sector was a piece of cake back then.  Since the Internet wasn’t very widespread, it was something you only rarely heard about.  Most of them would come with a message like “legalize marijuana” or something.  

I remember I had a co-worker who had a collection of viruses.  It was a little stack of diskettes, each one of which could infest your computer with some malicious code.  I thought that was pretty cool, but he must be having a hard time keeping up these days!

Well, that’s about all the time I have today to write, so as usual, please don’t click outta here without leaving me some comments!  I love those comments!

Have a great day!