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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I love the association that younger generations have with paper maps is pirates. Literally everyone used maps, they had racks of them at gas stations. And yet, now they’re legendary items that only exist with Xs that mark the location of treasure.

    Also, I cannot explain my excitement the first time I cut a human out of the pizza ordering pipeline. With zero regard for the employment impact, all I could think about was never getting the wrong kind of pizza (or it it going to the wrong house and never showing up) again. No longer was there a risk of being misheard or someone else making a mistake entering the order info for your address or a half sausage and onion, half pepperoni jalapeño pizza. Everyone around me thought ordering your pizza through an internet website was the nerdiest thing. Most of them didn’t know it was an option and even after my explanation, they preferred to call, wait your turn on hold, repeat your house number, spell out your street name, give a cross street and explain which half of the pizza was your parents toppings and which half was the kids. People just couldn’t believe that you could type something into a computer at your house and then a pizza would show up, without the assurance of a person’s voice confirming they’d received your order and that they will cook exactly what you requested and bring it to you. Of course there was no feedback in those days. You didn’t get an ETA for when it would arrive, an update when your pizza was being cooked, or when the driver left the shop, let alone a GPS tracked map of the drivers location. Once you selected whether you were paying in cash (like a normal person) or paid in advance with a credit card (like some kind of fancy business person), you just waited. If your order didn’t show up after 45 mins, you pick up the house phone, find a coupon you saved with the pizza shop number, and manually press physical plastic buttons that moved and beeped, which was the style at the time.







  • I don’t remember how I got involved, but I somehow convinced the school that I knew what I was doing and they let me (starting as a 16 year old student in 1997) create my own elective class where I spent one period every day working with that same 20 something computer lab guy. We built the lab together, just me and this dude who just barely graduated, alone for an hour a day. We put together Frankenstein machines with parts from old busted 286s and rarely a coveted 386. I learned to set up a Novell NetWare network and throw expansion slot cover plates like shuriken.

    I still remember working in that lab when the Phantom Menace trailer released online and we downloaded the .mov file (and required QuickTime 3.0 player) to view it in stunning 480x216. That’s sub 240p. It looked fucking amazing.