Older Folks and Vaping Back Porch - Part 2

[AndriaD]

I agree, Janet, I also think people are more fun who've done more things, seen more things, *lived* more things; my son is 25, and I love being around him, his sense of humor is wicked; but when his friends are around, I'm outta there! They speak in some sort of 21st century geek code -- gaming and smart phones and bands I never heard of, whose members appear to be space aliens or something (I can imagine my own folks felt this way about David Bowie, et al!). I can go on with anyone about many aspects of the WWW, but none of that twitter stuff, and not much of the facebook either, and I've never owned any kind of mobile phone, nevermind a "smart" one! Yes I believe I am becoming a curmudgeon; I'm starting to sound like my own parents 35+ ys ago. And unlike 35+ years ago, now those things in the sink over there are MY dishes, and I don't have a handy teenager to wash them for me, so I gotta go do it my damn self.

Andria

 

[Slots]

I'm almost 53; And I can't stand other general-purpose forums where the average age is about 23, and they seem to speak some other language

We all hear ya on that one.... your just right for us.
We all speak a language "they" don't understand because they don't have "memories" of "back when" like we do.
They dont understand what the heck we are talking about either.
Pick a rocker, your "home"

 

[Slots]

Anyone besides me having trouble with ECF loading. All others seem to be loading just fine. :confused

Haven't had a problem with "others" either, but yes ECF has been a pain today.
Guess it's time to do some house cleaning in the ol'puter

 

[AndriaD]

We all hear ya on that one.... your just right for us.
We all speak a language "they" don't understand because they don't have "memories" of "back when" like we do.
They dont understand what the heck we are talking about either.
Pick a rocker, your "home"

LMAO... really, a genuine belly laugh! What's funny is that my "smoking area" is the front porch, and an old-fashioned rocking chair. Now I'm going to be switching over to vaping, I guess I don't really have to go out there to partake, unless I just want to. Atlanta does have some fine weather at times, but man, the times when it doesn't, I'm gonna be really glad not to have to go out there. Unfortunately the new Cinnamon Redhot juice I ordered (to replace all these tobacco flavors that all of a sudden just grossed me out) won't be here till probably Thursday-ish; Michigan to GA, probably 3 days; and the weather is taking a turn for the worse with this new storm that's coming through, "Pax;" they don't seem to think that we'll get much of the frozen stuff this far south, but Wed the high temp is supposed to be only 30 degrees, so I hope the streets are dry, or it will be a huge mess; they have no infrastructure to deal with this real winter weather down here, so the interstates turn into parking lots while we all just wait for it to melt. And I most likely won't have the new juice yet, so I'll be out there puffing in the 30 degree weather. Grrrr... really it was this real winter for a change that got me so het up about switching to e-cigs, so I guess I should be grateful we're having a real winter this year; the last 2 were barely winter at all, so the mosquitoes, mites, and assorted other wildlife just went nuts -- and with e-cigs, I can FINALLY give the #$^&$%!!! cigarettes a rest!

Andria

 

[MattB101]

I have been through similar situations with both of my parents, sad to say, and my prayers are with you and your family. This is hard stuff to deal with, and getting good care is a nightmare. You need to designate someone in the family to be The advocate to keep an eye on your mother-in-law and whatever care provider is selected. I am still living with my mom as her care provider, and did the same for my dad for 5 yrs before he needed more care than I could give while working fulltime, then 2 yrs after that while he was in residential care. That was in California. Necessary to keep an eye on the care providers, truly.

Thanks for the kind words and advice. Went looking at skilled nursing care places yesterday and found a couple that look promising.

Sent with my arthritic thumbs with proofreading help from the hound!

 

[MattB101]

Yep, I know. Lets see......... I retired in 2004 and had worked at the casino for 6 years so it definitely was a while ago. We had 3 of the biggies and everything else ran on Windows Server. My favorite system will always be the Honeywell with the iron core. Love the tape drives and disc 6-packs. Also had the worst experience of my life with the Honeywell...........I tightened down one of the 6-packs to change it out. Got it out of the drive and discovered it was not quite as secure as I thought because it went crashing to the floor!

I even have a read-write ring from an IBM main frame tape drive hanging from my desk hutch door pull.

20 years in the navy. First tactical data system ran on a 64k Unisys CP-642B (big as a refrigerator) with an ECMU (extended core memory unit) that was about 1 mb, if that. The memory in both was ferrite core and was likely to crash when the forward gun mount fired. Oh what fun!

Sent with my arthritic thumbs with proofreading help from the hound!

 

[AndriaD]

20 years in the navy. First tactical data system ran on a 64k Unisys CP-642B (big as a refrigerator) with an ECMU (extended core memory unit) that was about 1 mb, if that. The memory in both was ferrite core and was likely to crash when the forward gun mount fired. Oh what fun!

Anyone here that was any part of the pre-internet, BBS beginnings? I ran a single line msg board from 1989-1994 RIP, on a 640k Tandy 1000SL with 2 floppy drives (and no hard drive!); that was "back when" you actually had to know something, to get online! I remember when I got a high-speed UART, because I had a 9600 modem; I could lock the port at 19.2 and get A WHOLE K inside a minute! I remember at one point when I did get a hard drive, I got an 80MB (yes, megabytes!) for $200, and that was a real steal. And I remember reading a short blurb in a column about emerging technologies, in PC World magazine, about a brand new thing called "hypertext markup language," (the HTML we know and love now!) and thought it sounded really neat. heh!

Andria

 

[Slots]

Unfortunately the new Cinnamon Redhot juice I ordered (to replace all these tobacco flavors that all of a sudden just grossed me out) won't be here till probably Thursday-ish; weather. Grrrr...

Yep ... Mother Nature had showed all of us who's boss this year.
On the Cinnamon Redhots, I hope you are putting that in a glass tank...it will eat up any of the plastic-ish types.
Just a warning is case you hadn't heard.

Don't throw away the tobacco juices you have left.
They will taste completely different in a couple of months.
That's not even counting what your taste buds are going to pull on ya.
Also, they are good for adding a few drops to other juices that are "missing" something.
At a few drops, you won't taste the tobacco, but it can really change a juice, and make it vapeable.
Combo-ing juice flavors don't always act like blending flavors of food.
I know a guy that adds Popcorn to his Strawberry Shortcake, and it makes the juice.
Weird huh ??

Have fun in the snow ... we have a foot too (about a month late in coming) Surprise !!

 

[Hypnophone]

I, for one, enjoy being an old fart.
Here's why:

 

[umanbean]

Anyone here that was any part of the pre-internet, BBS beginnings? I ran a single line msg board from 1989-1994 RIP, on a 640k Tandy 1000SL with 2 floppy drives (and no hard drive!); that was "back when" you actually had to know something, to get online! I remember when I got a high-speed UART, because I had a 9600 modem; I could lock the port at 19.2 and get A WHOLE K inside a minute! I remember at one point when I did get a hard drive, I got an 80MB (yes, megabytes!) for $200, and that was a real steal. And I remember reading a short blurb in a column about emerging technologies, in PC World magazine, about a brand new thing called "hypertext markup language," (the HTML we know and love now!) and thought it sounded really neat. heh!

Andria

Yes'm, I was. My first modem was a used 300 baud Hayes. When I could finally afford a new Hayes 1200 baud Smartmodem, I thought that thing was a speed demon! My first computer was a TI 99-4A hooked up to a color TV, then a Radio Shack Color Computer on the same TV. Shortly after I got the CoCo, I got a job a the local Radio Shack as the computer salesman. They actually had 3 repairmen working in the back fixing stuff, and a retired Navy elec. tech that came in to pick up TVs to carry home and fix. Those four guys taught me and helped me to build a full-size 5.25" hard drive, with a built-from-scratch power supply. That old CoCo was versatile too! I got a speech input module, and an X10 control module to control lights and stuff around the house. Wrote a BASIC program to make the speech module control the X10 module, and could say "Living room OFF" and it would turn off the LR light. Even built a light sensor that controlled the lights automatically, and was working on a temp. sensor (with a thermistor from an old TV set) when I got sidetracked by learning MS-DOS 1.2.

Good times!

Still have that whole CoCo setup in a big box out in the storage building.

 

[umanbean]

Oh yeah, the other topic I wanted to comment on... man bags.

I've carried a small "camera bag" everywhere I go for the last >35 years. In addition to a 35mm camera, I keep all kinds of "stuff" in it. Don't care what anybody thinks, or says.

About 30 years ago, 'bout 10 of us were on a weekend canoe trip. At suppertime we were cooking fresh-caught fish and a buddy's wife pulled out a bottle of wine, only to realize she had no corkscrew. After some rummaging around I found a fold-up one in my bag.

Since then, and forever more, I've had the rep among my group of friends that "If ya need something, ask Geno, he's probably got it in his bag."

 

[DancingHeretik]

The CoCo3 was my first computer. Next came a generic 286. It was hard to find a generic back in those days.

Oh, the memories! The sound of the modem getting the computer online and giving me time to get up and get a cup of coffee. Working off dual HD floppies (all the rage back then) and not understanding why anyone could possibly need a hard-drive (which were $400/400mb). All the free games and programs we used to get from the BBSs. Telix, DOS, PCTools, writing my own poker game in C, . . . . fun times!

 

[MikeE3]

I'm almost 53; is that too young? I hope it's not, because sometimes I get tired of having to always be right on topic, I'm sure you've noticed. And I can't stand other general-purpose forums where the average age is about 23, and they seem to speak some other language which I might or might not understand. My husband, who is now 61, says I am becoming an old fart, and I'm afraid he's right.

Andria

Andria - welcome to the back porch. No need to be 'right on topic' - the topic of the day can change so fast here - don't matter what you're talking about - it's on topic.

 

[MikeE3]

Geez - we've got a lot of early computer geeks on the porch. Yike's we've come a long way - remember when this was all the rage.

 

[1wildman]

My first home computer was a Sinclair ZX80 - blazing fast 3.25mhz processor and whopping 4k ROM. I also remember my first laptop pre-windows 3.1 days it had 2MB ram and a 20MB HD... i told my wife i would never fill a 20MB hard drive. I bought a 4mb RAM upgrade for my laptop and it cost me around $400.

 

[umanbean]

My first home computer was a Sinclair ZX80 - blazing fast 3.25mhz processor and whopping 4k ROM. I also remember my first laptop pre-windows 3.1 days it had 2MB ram and a 20MB HD... i told my wife i would never fill a 20MB hard drive. I bought a 4mb RAM upgrade for my laptop and it cost me around $400.

Dang wildman... you had the first of the first!

Geez - we've got a lot of early computer geeks on the porch. Yike's we've come a long way - remember when this was all the rage.

A friend of mine still has an Atari Pong game "console" in mint condition! We wasted hours and hours playing that thing, on a old B&W TV.

 

[williegntx]

Yep and Slick there in his Polyester Suit's an 'ole fart' now too...

Geez - we've got a lot of early computer geeks on the porch. Yike's we've come a long way - remember when this was all the rage.

 

[williegntx]

Thanks to all for the replies about ECF loading problems. Don't know what the problem was, but today it seems to be working much better. Must have been solar flares messin' with my AT&T wireless whatchmacallit.

 

[Iffy]

... i told my wife i would never fill a 20MB hard drive.

And then Microsoft did dat fer ya!

 

[Ohms Lawbreaker]

Hi everybody, just stopped by for a quick diaper change.

Had an old Zenith. Took two floppies just to get to DOS. Monopoly was not what it is on computers today. More computing power in my iTaste V3. We didn't have no "mice" when we were kids, we kept our offices clean dammit.

Sorry to change and run. See ya!