Hey! I'm back!

[Homeloaf]

It has been far too long since I have seen the comforting yellow background of this page. I have since turned 15, bought new guitars, and grown my hair longer!

Ya know, I've been dealing mostly with V.B. 6.0, but I still have most of my old programs.

Boy, has it been a long time. I'm glad I remembered my password. The machine I'm using just completely died, and I wasn't able to get on the net for a while.

Speaking of machines, I now have *2* new ones! One is a 1.8 ghz Pentium based machine. 768 mg of RAM, 256 mg Video card, and 240 gig of hard drive space. DVD-ROM, 52x CD burner.

My other machine is a Duo-Core machine. 1 gig of ram, 256 mg video card, DVD-R/RW, and Wi-Fi. Get this: It's a laptop. Only nine-hundred bucks! |-|0|_y <0\/\/!

Whelp, I'll see what this generates! I'll catch up on the rest of the board! ;D

[Mikrondel]

The machine I'm using just completely died, and I wasn't able to get on the net for a while.

I have never seen that happen. I know it does, but in my experience it's almost always one component that needs replacement and you're back up again.

Now hear what my web server and lots of other servers are running on: A 120MHz Pentium-S with 64KB RAM and IIRC 4MB of video memory. No CD or DVD drives. And it still manages to work fairly decently.
AND GUESS HOW MUCH IT COST? - Only nothing at all.

Let me add that my desktop PC is a 133MHz Pentium II. And I'm fine with that. Not that I'm a fan of any 3D games.

I don't have anything against people who get unbelievably fast hardware if they need to; but if it's a matter of waiting 10 milliseconds rather than 2, I don't really see the point. And I think it's good to have an appreciation of hardware.

I think is terrific: www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

[Homeloaf]

Certainly! This is just the most spoiled I've ever been. I've never been able to play a good FPS before, but now I can run UT2K4 with everything all the way up. I'm just slightly jazzed.

But games aren't my first priority. I do lots of video and audio editing. Even with parallel processors, it can take a couple hours to really make something professional shine. I have the whole Macromedia MX 2004 Suite, too, so I can kick some major butt.

I have an extremely cool SNES emulator. Oftentimes, I play two player SNES games with my brother. Over the network. Oh yeah, it's cool.

I haven't said anything about my new brother yet! WHOA! Remember Lurking Dragon, Goldmember, and various other names? The guy who was such a buttface? His mom died, and since I was/am his best friend and closest person, he lives with us now! It's pretty sweet. Not his mom dying, she was really awesome. Him living with us is the cool part.

[Homeloaf]

Oh yeah, in regards to the whole computer crapping out:

I had it all laid out one night and just fell asleep.

My mom laid my "fresh from the dryer" clothes out. Inside of my open computer. Static damage pretty much ate the RAM and blew most of the motherboard circuitry. I was, however, able to salvage the hard drive and audio card.

Out of nothing, brilliance.

[Mikrondel]

Well, video and audio processing can be very intensive, and while my own priorities lie elsewhere I'll grant that as a very valid reason for wanting an über computer.

Have you read the article at the link I provided?

[earlofqb]

The story of Mel is a good, and actually true story. Do some research on the Internet, and you won't believe it. Back in the day, he did exist, and nowadays he's hailed as the world's greatest and last "real" programmer.

Actually, after reading that story, I wanted to find out how to code in binary like he did, then gave up after realising that I'd have to memorise tables of binary conversions and then decide between hex, octal, and straight binary. Still, someday I'll try my hand at that stuff...

Sorry about the guy's mom. Is he doing alright?

[Homeloaf]

Yah. He's fine.

As to Mel's story, I have a parallel. With my dad.

When AT&T first broke up, there were a bajillion little phone companies offering "long distance." ComNet was owned by my grandfather.

They had recently purchased a new phone switch, which, if you haven't seen one, is just a big jumble of wires that no normal person could figure out. They also bought 4mg of RAM for it, which was $5000. They supplemented it with an 8mg hard drive. I forget how much it was, but it was in the thousands.

When you looked at the front of the machine, there were 17 switches; two banks of toggles for binary and one "Enter" button. My dad didn't have the manual.

He programmed the thing through pure logic. He'd never used binary or anything of the sort, but he learned through programming this phone switch.

He's a god.

[earlofqb]

Did you mean 4 mb and 8 mb?

As to the learning to program binary via the switch, that is very impressive. I couldn't do that if I tried...

[Homeloaf]

Yes. 4 mb and 8 mb. Lost me mind.

I wrote a "String to Binary" program that took a string and translated it, letter by letter, into its binary equivalent. The output files were huge. I had to key in all 26 letters twice, and numbers once. I didn't do all the keys. That would have been rediculous.

Pointless program, but not unentertaining.

[Mikrondel]

homeloaf said:

I had to key in all 26 letters twice, and numbers once.

Why did you have to do that?

[Homeloaf]

The binary was also a string. My goal was just to replace the character with its binary string. I found a sheet that had a chart of all the characters, their binary, octal, hex, and something else counterparts.

Is there a function that does that? I would be so P.O.d. I never even thought of that until you had to mention it. Thanks, Mik.

[Ildûrest]

Not included with QB, but it's easy enough to do yourself...

You really should know how this is done, otherwise you're still a noob and should keep fiddling with QB

[Homeloaf]

n00bism is discouraged!

I've been coding for 7 years now! With large breaks in between. Started when I was eight years old... Back in the days of crappy monochrome monitors. *tears*

Well, there were real monitors. I just got an XT with a whole !!! 512 kb !!! of RAM! Well, I was surprised when I happened upon Qbasic. Keep in mind that I learned to code without any math classes further than those from the 5th grade. I learned math and variables through coding, not the other way around, like normal people.

Enough egotistical stupidness! Let's talk about something else! Like hair, and how to flail it properly.

I hate seeing people who can't headbang properly. They don't use their hands, or their facial expression. They're just stupid and should be genocided...

[earlofqb]

So, I should be genocied?

Teach me, oh great master of the concert!

[Homeloaf]

Well, do you headbang correctly?

Actually, what kind of music do you like? If you're a metal-head, then you should headbang. If you're more of a classical or Tom Petty/Barenaked Ladies person, you needn't. I like most if not all genres of music. Yes, that includes *select* rap. Like "Can't Touch This."

Dah------na-na-na
Na--na
Na--na
Hammertime!
(repeat as necessary)

[earlofqb]

Yes, "U Can't Touch This" (the proper title), by MC Hammer is possibly one of my favourite rap songs (and is one of the perhaps 5 rap songs I tolerate. Mostly I don't like rap because it romanticises wife-beating, being a dead-beat dad, and generally being the worst person in the world).

I listen mostly to classic rock, country, classical, Latin music (depends on it mostly. Also, whenever possible, I like to understand the words ), and (to quote you) *select* metal (nothing with pure screaming in the microphone, there has to be audiable words and a great beat).

[earlofqb]

Have you ever used iTunes' free weekly download? Helps expand your musical tastes, and it's free both to download, and to sign up.

The only problem would be if you were on dialup (raises hand), and it takes forever to download one song. Also, some-to-most of the songs are complete {censored}, but since it's free, it really doesn't matter, now does it? Just trash it and move on

[Homeloaf]

Say, Earl. I have an excellent band for you to try if you aren't already a fan. Dragonforce is a wonderful metal band with absolutely epic vocals. He's across between Freddie Mercury (Queen) and Dave Mustaine (Megadeth, previously Metallica). I think you'd enjoy them.

I've had excellent luck with my dial-up, but not because of the [sarcasm] lightening quick speed [/sarcasm], but because I run a P2P program all night. It is a lot faster than I originally thought, but you can pull down about 200mb in 8 hours. It's cool. I use Bearshare, although many prefer Limewire or E-Mule. If you're looking for a song that you need right away, dogpile.com has a great audio search engine. You have to pay for Yahoo's, and Google's isn't as good as Dogpile's.