How do they know? For the first time in years, all Aurora libraries are closed for “training and maintenance”. How do they know I’d be here and wanting to spend a day there with my own training and maintenance. I made it all the way here and I finally met Ben, the big bear of a dog. If that surprises anyone, it is because poor timing on my part made sure I never actually met the critter on any occasion over these years.
This is a model of typewriter where the hammers swing down from the left and right to hit the paper dead center. That’s those “ears” you see above the platen. It seems in early times, the operators distrusted office machines unless they could witness the mechanics. I stopped at the Aurora Historical Museum, and this was about the only interesting artifact in their whole three rooms.I took the sidecar for a twenty mile run around this completely unfamiliar city. The only time I was here before, I got a crack in my Cadillac windshield. It is modern, clean, and hilly, at least all of it I’ve seen. They generally know how to build straight roads. Women are plainly more forward, but then again, the sidecar spells “s-i-n-g-l-e”, “a-v-a-i-l-a-b-l-e” and “a-p-p-r-o-a-c-h-a-b-l-e”. It also telegraphs my personality, as in traveling alone, not a couch potato, and able to afford fun without extravagance.
Expect a quiet day, as that seven day marathon trip tuckered me out and psychological or not, the air is thinner. But I’ve also got unexpected after-effects, like a slight wrist strains because, unlike a car, you cannot drive the motorcycle with one hand for very long. It also gets your shoulders involved and I felt that when I straddled the rider’s chair this morning. Patience, I’ll be good as new after another night, there is something about mountain air. I think you breathe deeper in your sleep.
Here was the one other museum exhibit that got my attention. This is an exact replica of my first computer, the Apple ][e. No, not the IIe, that is a wrong spelling, probably by the people who, to this day, still think they know more about computers than I do. Isn’t that right, Patsie? I had this exact Apple setup back in 1981, including the two disk drives. One for your program, one for your data. And if you wanted software, generally you wrote it. This is the machine that I painstakingly programmed a spreadsheet, called Visicalc (for Visual Calculator) to calculate 15 and 20 year mortgages. But I was too early. Bank after bank, and their offices, turned me down. I suspect it was because they themselves didn’t understand mortgage math. The motherboard on this computer lies flat in that compartment behind the keyboard. That was a convenient spot for your monochrome (green and black) monitor, as shown here.
I may have mentioned this computer many times, it had a huge influence on the way I view computers differently than most consumers. I never got caught up in the speed and RAM game that IBM and MS inflicted on the next generation. I saw that for what it was, a snow job for little boys to play one-upmanship. I used to take pride this 8K Apple could do anything a 64K IBM could do. I also learned long before the public not to invest in the latest technology until if proved itself. I’m the guy that threw away my HTML book in 1998 saying what garbage that language was. (I was right, but it became the standard.)
I had learned not to buy any memory device until it was read-write, so I was one of the last to get a CD burner. (But also one of the first to completely understand how to use all of its capabilities. I won’t say how Glenn and crowd laughed because I studied the manual before I bought it, but years later they are still making bad recordings.) And I remember the day in 1991, when with regret, I purchased my first IBM unit as Apples had finally priced themselves out of my range (and I was making big money back then). That was November 19, two days after I returned from California, empty-handed.
And although you won’t spot it, there is a delay in posting the blogs from Aurora. Everybody here has forgotten the router password. It may take another 24 hours to find it, I’ve been running the sniffer since I arrived. Last, the finals aren’t in but it cost around $700 to get here.
Return Home
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
