First Day of the 09/10 Financial Year

[Caravan Ray]

Happy New (financial) Year!!!!


I just got back from the pub.

AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHH

I just played my "Don't Break My Heart George Lucas " song

Went off like a bomb. The punters loved it. The punters loved me.

Weird thing though - a dude said to me afterwards: "you didn't write that , did you. Cos I've heard that before, my mate downloaded that song off the internet and gave it to me...."


How cool is that!!!!! Thank you Songfight!

QOTD: Does anyone else have a cool story like that?

[ujnhunter]

That's pretty cool CRay... I love that song!

QotD: I have no cool stories...

[JonPorobil]

Weird thing though - a dude said to me afterwards: "you didn't write that , did you. Cos I've heard that before, my mate downloaded that song off the internet and gave it to me...."


How cool is that!!!!! Thank you Songfight!

QOTD: Does anyone else have a cool story like that?

Some friends of mine made a random allusion to "Happy Machine Ankle" in their conversation. Turns out they were big followers of Songfight in 2003-2004, when Brother Machine was still active. I think I've mentioned this before, though.

[fluffy]

qotd: When I was in high school I wrote a few crappy shareware games for fun, and one time, one of my games (a vector-graphics physics-based Joust variant, where speed rather than height determined the winner) somehow came up in conversation with a random stranger, and said stranger said, "Really? You wrote that?! I loved that game!"

I don't think the game actually exists anywhere anymore, and even if it does it's hard to find since it had a very nondescript name which has now been used by a bunch of crappy Flash games (many of which are erotic in nature, oddly enough). It also probably wouldn't run on any modern hardware since I wrote it in Turbo Pascal, whose programs have a nasty tendency to self-destruct on computers faster than 100MHz because of a timing-sensitive divide-by-zero bug in one of the common libraries' startup code.

Every now and then I also come across someone who genuinely liked Sprung.

Oh and whenever I see someone using a Kindle in public it makes me feel warm and fuzzy, so there's that.

[Albatross]

It also probably wouldn't run on any modern hardware since I wrote it in Turbo Pascal, whose programs have a nasty tendency to self-destruct on computers faster than 100MHz because of a timing-sensitive divide-by-zero bug in one of the common libraries' startup code.

It's not actually dividing by zero, even though that's the error code you get. It's a range checking bug that occurs in programs compiled with that option turned on when they try to run on a Pentium II or later. There's a small command-line app called "tp_patch" that will actually modify the contents of the exe file and allow it to run. We deal with that problem sometimes at my job, all of our REALLY old stuff (very early 90s) was written in Turbo Pascal.

Um, as you were.

[fluffy]

I could have sworn it happened in release mode too (no range-checking), but it's been a LONG time so you're probably right.

[irwin]

Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerds!

[Rabid Garfunkel]

And I flash back to the 2008 tour... who's starting off the Wesley Willis parodies this time?

[rone rivendale]

QotD:Well, one day I recieved a letter from some random guy in South Hampton, NY. It said he was a director who had done a local jewelry store commerical and used an instrumental of one of my earlier songs as bg music. Enclosed in the letter was a check for $300. It's not like he HAD to pay me. I wouldn't have known that he did that commerical in NY when I live in KS. But he did it out of honor (maybe fear of lawsuit).

Also you might have heard that Melvin covered one of my songs and it was put into the major motion picture Shred starring Tom Green. ^_^

Yup, I've mentioned both of those many many times. I don't care. It's fitting with the QotD. So there.

[fluffy]

And I flash back to the 2008 tour... who's starting off the Wesley Willis parodies this time?

Assuming you mean in the car, I forget who started it but I'm the one who made the observation that "living under the onramp" would make an excellent Wesley Willis title and so that led to doing a Wesley Willis thing.

I believe that came immediately after the terrible band names improvisation during which the only one I remember was "Mystic Phogg."

[fluffy]

oh wait i thought this was the song fight trivia thhread

i'm al ittle drunk

[fluffy]

karaoke was awesome tonigh tbut i gotta learn to not sing songs which are all just beyond my upper vocal range right after i've been shouting to be heard over the din of a really loud bar

[jimtyrrell]

Oh man, I know what you mean. People get angry at me at band shows sometimes because I don't want to talk to them for long between sets. And it's for exactly that reason. I've shouted out my voice on break before and it sucks.

[mrbeany]

Happy New (financial) Year!!!!

QOTD: Does anyone else have a cool story like that?

Back in the dank dim past, I worked for a company called Be, Inc. I've met people before who knew of the company before and were excited when I told them I worked there. That always made my day. It also made my day to see someone in an unexpected place wearing a Be t-shirt.

Off topic, my 14 week early preemie daughter is doing super-duper. She's well over 95% for her adjusted age in weight and length. She has probably reached 10x her birth weight already.

[fluffy]

Count me in that group. Be made some awesome things and they are truly one of the biggest tech industry tragedies of the late 90s. Awesome hardware with a niche market, an amazing OS with no customers, and so much potential from various buyers which was completely wasted.

It's particularly shameful that Palm never did anything with the Be assets, and that Apple didn't offer enough money to Jean-Louis Gassee to get him back (and instead went with Jobs). In the long run Jobs has certainly been better for the company but it would have been nice if they'd replaced Mac OS with BeOS instead of NeXTStep (although OSX has done a pretty good job of catching up capabilities-wise).

[Rabid Garfunkel]

Back in the dank dim past, I worked for a company called Be, Inc. I've met people before who knew of the company before and were excited when I told them I worked there. That always made my day. It also made my day to see someone in an unexpected place wearing a Be t-shirt.

Holy shit! Still have the 1.0 cds for Mac that I picked up at a MWSF eons ago. Never had a processor that'd run 'em, tho. Jumped from a 603 to a G3. Wish I'd picked up one of the BeBoxes y'all were demoing...

[fluffy]

I thought BeOS DR3 ran on the 603.

I had DR4 which ran nicely on my K6-233, although I could never get it to work with my ne2000 network card.

It's amazing how many things on Linux try to emulate the BeOS look (and like everything on Linux it's a thin veneer of a visual simulacrum which completely misses the point from a design and functionality standpoint).

[Lunkhead]

I've still got my Be t-shirt, too.

[JonPorobil]

Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerds!

[fluffy]

Ah, just found a list of BeOS-compatible PPC systems. The PCI-based 603s were, but the NuBus-based ones (i.e. most PPC603 Macintoshes) were not. That makes sense.

I guess all the systems I saw it running on were actually PPC604s, except my friend's Power Computing system, which ran DR3 brilliantly and could also run Mac OS under SheepShaver which was totally a best-of-both-worlds setup since he could run NetPositive *AND* Paper Glider, AT THE SAME TIME. (While a spinning cube had a different video texture-mapped to each face.)

[Rabid Garfunkel]

Sorry, should've clarified the computer was a Powerbook Duo 2300. Was there an "e" in the processor type? Hell, it's been too long to revisit that level of obsession (though I still break it out every now & then to remind myself how cool OpenDoc was).

[fluffy]

The PBDuos used yet another bus type, so it's no surprise those wouldn't work with anything other than Mac OS. They were awesome machines though.