Geek

So I’m trying out the latest social craze, BlueSky. Or is it Blue Sky. Or is it bsky?

Whatever it is called, I’m called @machias@bsky.social over there.

I think it was 1982 when my parents bought me a Commodore VIC-20 for Christmas. I was very excited to have my own computer that had a keyboard and such; up until then my computer time was spent in the Apple ][+ lab at school and I was only allowed to sign up for time in 30 minutes increments per week. This was because I was an underclassman and wasn’t officially in a computer class. The VIC-20 allowed me to do a lot of experimenting with BASIC programs; a vast majority of my early programming learning came from retyping programs that appeared in magazines like “COMPUTE!”. I programmed my first cash register program on this computer and used that foundation to build the same program on the Apple ][+ (and later //e) systems at school, in half hour increments. The Apple version was much more robust because the computers had a bit more power; I saved enough money to get the 8K RAM expansion cartridge for my VIC-20 a few months after receiving the computer as a gift and I was very excited.

The computer lab at work quickly expanded with the adoption of technology and we had more robust machines by the latter half of my sophomore year. Since there were more machines I was allowed to sign for more than 30 minutes a week in the computer lab and I dutifully worked on my cash register program. It became fairly robust (for the time) and I would mirror the work on my VIC-20 at home. I was always (and still am) very interested in electronic cash registers and point of sale systems, so building a program to emulate what I saw at the local stores was a great way to learn good programming skills. If entering the same data in my program produced the same results as the computations I would see on saved cash register receipts, I was doing something right. It was my rudimentary checks and balances of my work.

Between my junior and senior years of high school I worked for the school district for the summer, cleaning the school with a handful of other students my age. It paid well and the work wasn’t too hard. It was actually something I enjoyed. I was able to save up some money and bought my first car and my next computer, a Commodore 64.

Since my cash register program worked well on the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 was mostly compatible language wise, I was able to build a much more robust version of the program for the Commodore 64. I tested this program out at the family hardware store (much to the chagrin of the older generation) as a “second checkout” that was used a handful of times when the store was busy. I made a nifty little setup by adding a few accessories to make it behave more like a cash register. All of these photos are from various eBay auctions.

The mini TV worked will with the setup and I used some scrap lumber from the family store and lumber yard to built a little stand that held everything neatly in place. I tweaked the cash register program enough to build in some error checking. There wasn’t enough memory to hold a list of items, UPC or other codes, and price reliably, and I was still loading everything from cassette at the time. So, I divided everything up into departments and required an entered price obey parameter rules, for example, paint would be department 001 and the cashier couldn’t enter a price less than $5.00 or more than $50.00. I found myself to be clever.

I repeated the school cleaning job after graduating from high school and was able to add a few more accessories to my setup, namely a 300 baud modem and the coveted 1541 floppy disk drive.

With the disk drive I was able to introduce item price lookups by UPC or other coding, albeit all manually typed in by the cashier, but it worked and I was pleased. I also beefed up the interface, moving it from prompts that resembled a 2 line by 40 character display to something more like filling in an invoice. With the modern I was able to connect to local BBSes (bulletin board services) where other programmers shared their wares. I also had an early account on GEnie, or the General Electric Network Information Exchange, which used GE’s timesharing systems after business hours. I was able to get some time on an IBM PC, continue use of the Apple computers at school, and keep the Commodore 64 versions of my program all going at the same time and I shared them all through the local BBS (which was a long distance call my mother didn’t appreciate) and through GEnie. I continued the practice during my freshman year of college and I ended up creating floppy disks of the program and selling them through the mail as shareware. This funded my spending money during my freshman year of college but distracted from my studies and mandatory instrument practice routine for music school.

In 1987 I received a message from a man on GEnie named Patrick. I don’t remember his last name. He offered me a decent amount of money for my program, all three versions (Commodore 64, which also ran on the 128, Apple ][, and IBM PC), if I promised not to share it through the BBSes anymore and take it off GEnie. I told him I’d send him my disks, my notes, and would take things down when the check was in my hand. I figured he was full of crap. He was not. I received a check, deposited it in my account, and sent him everything I had promised. My program was no longer mine and I wasn’t making and mailing disks anymore, but it was the end of my freshman year and I wouldn’t be returning.

The family was still not interested in computerizing point of sale operations at the family business, but the aging NCR posting machine was starting to require more maintenance than usual, so they did let me use my skills to write an Accounts Receivable program on a used TRS-80 Model II computer they had purchased for $100. The program grew as we added hard drives to the used system and subsequently upgraded the computer to new incarnations with more modern technology. The family used that A/R program up until the store was sold to new owners in 2010. At the time I had converted it to run on Linux, it stored everything it needed to maintain history for a customer, and quite frankly, was an exercise in amazement that something written in 1987 still chugged along 10 years into the 21st century.

During my years at Digital (DEC) I purchased a Rainbow 100+, DEC’s version of an IBM PC compatible, and rewrote the Point of Sale program from scratch. It was much more robust than the earlier variant and just needed a scanning mechanism to be fully like scanning registers at the time. I didn’t pursue sharing and selling the program, but once or twice in the early ’90s I believe I spied a variation of my original program in small businesses running seemingly MS-DOS point of sale software on a computer. The original screen layout I had introduced late in the game before receiving the check had a few of my quirks and this software I had seen in the wild had the exact same quirks. That was pretty nifty.

Ever since I was a young lad and first discovered reruns of “Star Trek” (The Original Series) on CKWS, to be enjoyed after school, I have loved the series. As a Trekker, I have a Starfleet uniform, an outfit I call my “Starfleet Shore Leave” wear, and I have followed along with most of the various series.

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” is one of my favorite series, and probably my absolute favorites of the “NuTrek” universe. “Star Trek: Lower Decks” is also a series I look forward to and I’m looking forward to season four coming out later this year.

There was recently a crossover between SNW and LD and I was really looking forward to seeing what that was all about. We sat down to watch the episode last night and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I won’t go into details of the episode and my only review is that it is an awesome experience, but there is one element from the show that I had to integrate into my daily life. You see, the structure of Starfleet, and the mind set of most of the characters on the show, is something I work toward. As a kid I hoped I’d see a more “Star Trek” type of society come to fruition with the arrival of the 21st century. I knew we wouldn’t have transporters and the like, but I was hoping we’d start figuring out the homeless and food shortage issues and all try harder to get along. Unfortunately the 21st century has swung us in the wrong direction and sometimes I get mired in the chaos and I find it brings me down.

A fellow fan of the show recreated a Starfleet recruitment poster spotted on the recent Strange New Worlds / Lower Deck episode (entitled “Those Old Scientists”) and I was delighted to find it was in high enough quality to print in a decent size.

The picture frame is ordered and scheduled to arrive tomorrow. I look forward to hanging this in my office, as a daily source of inspiration, before the end of the week.

Ad Astra Per Aspera.

We all know the evils of Social Media. It’s reactive, it’s explosive, and folks usually post stuff on Social Media just to get attention. Back in the early days of Social Media I was excited about the idea; it was like a message board one would find on AOL back in the ’90s or an expansion of the “blog” concept that had been around, at the time, for a decade or so.

I guess I didn’t see Social Media replacing blogs. And obviously, I haven’t gotten that memo.

Today I am doing everything I can to get away from Social Media; I’ve removed the apps from my iPhone, I make it hard for me to log into the various platforms, etc. The issue is, so many of my friends and family members are dependent on the platforms as their prime channel of communication. Aunt Lulu could drop dead and I wouldn’t get a phone call, just a post on Facebook. It’s gamble as to the timeliness of the news due to algorithms and the like.

I don’t have an Aunt Lulu, by the way, but I did picture Lulu from “Hee-Haw” when I typed that sentence.

Another thing I’ve noticed about Social Media, and specifically Facebook, is that it throws the natural progression of friendships and acquaintances askew. For example, let’s say that back in 2005 I started a new job and worked with a guy named Dirk. Dirk and I became work friends and then had a few beers outside the office and when Facebook started up, we both joined the platform and became friends. 2010 comes along and I have moved onto a new job, Dirk did the same and we haven’t really seen each other in person since our time together at our common employer. Dirk is a nice guy and has moved on to getting married and raising a family and the like, and his new job took him across the country. Dirk and I were never really that close, we just got along well at work, shared some common interests, and connected via Social Media because it was there. I doubt that since it’s been well over a decade since I’ve last seen Dirk, I won’t see Dirk again, unless Earl and I travel to that part of the country or something, but then I feel like I’d be imposing.

By the way, there isn’t really a Dirk.

So, Dirk and I had a good friendship at work and when we both moved onto other places, in the days before Social Media our friendship/acquaintance would have come to its natural conclusion. But connecting on Facebook skewed all that; we’re still connected well past the natural shelf date, neither of us want to “unfriend” the other because of niceties, and honestly, Dirk is using bandwidth I don’t have for information consumption when I scroll through Facebook and see that he’s painting his kitchen or something.

A similar phenomenon happens when one connects with an acquaintance you met at a party years ago, and you met just that one time, and now you’re connected for life through Social Media. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m just not wired to have a million and five friends scattered all over the planet and I’m trying hard to be too nice to not break connections because I don’t want to be the rude one.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some great people online, but most of the folks I consider friends I met in the pre-Social Media days, whether through AOL message boards around Macs, or through this blog thingee, or something like that. There are several people I know on social media that I met before social media and I enjoy what they share, but they’re usually like me and trying to get away from Social Media (hello London, hello Arkansas, hello Houston).

I should just do what I want to do and start breaking connections to those folks that would have come to a natural, friendly, mutual ending years ago. Maybe our Social Media connections shouldn’t be called friendships, but subscriptions instead.

Or maybe I should just go with the original plan to move away from Social Media altogether.

My mother often sends me screenshots of emails and text messages without explanation. I know it’s her way of asking if whatever she’s sent me is spam or real. 99% of the time it’s a spam message.

At work the Cyber Security department often sends out trick emails to test the userbase on their knowledge of rejecting spam. If one clicks a link in the fake spam email, we’re taken to a website with the link “youregonnalovetraining.com” or something like that, and our supervisor is notified. This hasn’t tripped me up in a couple of years.

This morning I received notification that my payment for our Amazon Prime membership had been rejected. Since my husband and I had just had a conversation about our membership, I had to take a few extra beats to determine if the message was real or not. It wasn’t, however, my use of Apple devices makes that rather hard to determine for the average user.

On my iPhone, at first sight it looks like this message did come from Amazon. “Undisclosed-recipients” should be a clue that something is amiss, because logically something about my credit card would come directly to me, not to a bunch of people. However, because Apple likes to hide things, you have to tap the arrow to the right of the “From” field, then expand it and try to open a contact card to see the actual address.

In MacOS the behavior is much like that in iOS. However, Apple is kind enough to show the “From” email address on the first click instead of just burying it in a contact card.

We have a webmail interface on our hosting server for our personal domain, and it gives the opportunity to get to the information by clicking “Headers”, but will standard users know what the means?

And finally, going in full blown geek mode, I often use the application Alpine on my personal Linux server to triage my email throughout the day. Hearkening back to the old school terminal (green screen) days, Alpine gives me a pure text view of my email.

Unsurprisingly, Alpine gives me the information right up front, just like email did 20, 30, hell, 40 years ago. There’s no GUI (Graphical User Interface) magic trying to hide pertinent information to make it look pretty.

I don’t have my accounts set up in the ways of Microsoft Outlook to see how this would have been handled in that arena. However, looking through similar emails on my work provided Windows 10 laptop with Microsoft Outlook, the “From” would have appeared much like it does in Alpine. That’s a good thing, and something Microsoft gets right.

If you ever receive an email and you’re not sure of its validity, tap or click around until you can see the actual address of the sender. That will generally give you a clue as to the authenticity. “Headers” can give you all sorts of information. Unfortunately, this is where Apple products fail the most, with their insistence of hiding as many technical details as possible.

Sometimes the technical details is where the dirt is at.

Last night, Jamie came running upstairs exclaiming “you gotta see this!”. He then talked about a huge shooting star and it was amazing. I walked out on his patio and saw this:

I immediately knew it was a rocket launch, apparently somewhere over California. Space X launched a Falcon 9 rocket last night from Vandenberg Space Force Base last night and living in Southern Arizona gave us the opportunity to witness the event. The rocket was carrying 15 Starlink satellites that will be used in the existing “mesh” network of satellites providing Internet connectivity to rural areas.

The Falcon 9 rocket is designed to return to Earth for reuse after a successful separation in orbit.

Nick at “The Linux Experiment” talks about why he thinks the ad-based Internet is dying.

God, I hope so.